Trying to reach left-handed nurses who like to bowl? The process starts with “a small piece of the truth” that Experian Marketing Services teases into a scalable advertising target. Explaining the evolution of Experian’s work with television providers, Kevin Heindl, who is Director of Partner & Advertiser Solutions, said the company used to solve the providers’ audience data and targeting problems on an individual, ad hoc basis.

“Now we’re interacting with agencies and advertisers and solving problems directly and moving it out to the operators” via the company’s Audience Engine platform, Heindl said during a panel discussion in Manhattan at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit on cross-screen addressability. “In the last year or so we started to roll the platform out to the owners themselves. They have access to a tool and can say, ‘I want to find left-handed nurses that like to bowl.’”

Experian assembles a variety of data building blocks to “take a small piece of the truth and expand it out based on what that truth looks like,” Heindl said.

In the automotive category, for example, he said Experian is one of only two sources for auto propensity data. “We can come up with a target of our own that’s based on people that have a propensity to be in the market for vehicle X,” said Heindl. “In addition, we have third-party data assets that actually show what autos are in the garage. We layer it on and learn against it.”

Once Experian gets exposure data back from TV operators, it matches it with the company’s auto registration data to find out “how many people actually bought one of those cars or bought a car like it so you can see share of market.” Additionally, Experian can determine from its mobile partnerships whether someone from a targeted household actually went to particular auto dealerships.

As more brand marketers adopt such data-driven approaches, “Unfortunately, I don’t seem as brilliant as I did about a year ago, because everybody’s starting to get it,” Heindl noted.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV leadership summit in New York on cross-platform addressability on July 26. The event and the series are presented by DISH Media Sales and Experian Marketing Services. Please visit this page to find additional videos from the summit.