HOLLYWOOD — Advertisers are grappling to develop single profiles that can read and understand their audiences across multiple devices and in a diverse range of contexts. But the same technology has application outside of just marketing.

That is according to an executive from one vendor helping brands to develop just such a “universal ID”.

“(Brands) have a great story about who bought what,” says Neustar SVP and chief data and analytics officer Venkat Achanta, in this video interview with Beet.TV  Achanta joined Neustar from Walmart last year.

“But they do a lot of marketing across channels and devices. They don’t quite understand what journeys led to what results and outcomes. To connect all of this, they need to understand the customer holistically. If you don’t understand that connection, you don’t understand the consumer deeply.”

Achanta’s Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection.

It is one of those approaching the problem, for brands, of unifying customer data inputs to achieve better results. But, Achanta says, the solution has more than one shape.

“Marketing is at the forefront of the digital revolution – they can be the catalyst to get this happening,” he adds. “But this can be a whole connected CRM – it doesn’t have to end with marketing.

“This deeper understanding will help you drive the right actions across the lifecycle of the customer.

“We’re deploying this not only in the marketing space but also risk and security. Does a person have a reason to be at that location on that device to be applying for a card. You can give a fraud risk score … to (know) whether to accept their application or not.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.