Nielsen looks set to take on Adobe for data-driven marketing suite services, after integrating its earlier eXelate acquisition.

eXelate is a data management platform (DMP), a software tool brands can use to slice and dice their customer data, and was acquired by Nielsen a year ago in a move which pooled the data sets eXelate had aggregated from over 200 sources with the media measurement and other data Nielsen has in spades.

The combination in to what eXelate chief revenue officer Damian Garbaccio is calling an “enterprise marketing platform” includes eXelate’s DMP, Nielsen’s multi-touch attribution suite and its ability to track consumer journeys from online ads to offline purchase, using Nielsen’s awareness of 80% of US credit card transactions.

“Starting off as a DMP six years ago, we saw the trend how data and programmatic was increasing,” Garbarccio tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Now, with Nielsen, we’re doing the next regeneration of a data management platform. We want to give brands autonomy through data.”

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud suite is the Big Daddy of online marketing services tools, including its own DMP, Adobe Audience Manager.

Over the last couple of years, the advertising industry has debated how brand advertisers can take advantage of advertising technologies and tools to manage much of their ad buying in-house. But Garbaccio thinks brands need more help than that.

“In talking to global CMOs for the last year, it’s clear they know this is a space they need to dig deeper in,” he says. “A lot of the larger CPG companies have announced they’re dedicating even more teams to programmatic.

“But no-one actually knows how to do it at a scale where it’s going to show the impact. It needs to go beyond that – leveraging programmatic to prove out the value is extremely important. Brands’ primary goal is not to understand the programmatic marketplace. They need a level a consultative approach to programatic.”

 

This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.