MarTech Interview with Matt Tipperreiter, Sr. Product Strategy Director at Experian

Matt, can you provide a brief overview of your professional journey and how it led you to your current role as Sr. Director of Product Management at Experian?
a. My name is Matt Tipperreiter, and I have worked for Experian Marketing Services for 26 years. My career has closely followed the trajectory of the advertising industry in becoming increasingly focused on direct consumer relationships and personalization. Currently, I oversee Experian’s Offline and Digital Graphs as well as our Collaboration products, helping platforms, marketers, and data and measurement providers use our identity products to meet their needs.

Describe key features of offline graph along with its significance in today’s data-driven advertising landscape.
a. Experian’s Offline Graph offers companies a license of stable offline data points, like name, address, phone number, email, geographic information, date of birth, and additional attributes that provide a complete view of household and individual identities. The Offline Graph integrates known offline identity information from reliable deterministic sources like property ownership records, public records, and marketing data to provide access to all United States consumers and households.

b. The Offline Graph serves as the foundation of several other Experian products because identity resolution services are only as good as the foundational data it’s built upon. And the breadth, depth, and accuracy of the data in our Offline Graph allows us to have the best understanding of who a consumer is and how they can be reached.

c. We’ve also seen success with companies licensing other Experian products with the Offline Graph. For example, companies looking to increase their reach can get more addressable identifiers when they license the Offline Graph with our Digital Graph. For companies that would like to gain more customer insights, licensing Offline Graph and Marketing Attributes is the right pairing.

How do you think this graph enhances the effectiveness of marketing strategies across various industries?
a. Experian’s Offline Graph is already driving value across industries. Here’s some examples:

i. A big box retailer fills in the blanks of their existing customer data and builds a database of prospects.
ii. A media platform more effectively onboards advertisers’ segments, enabling advertisers to reach more of their customers.
iii. A web publisher who has the name and hashed email (HEM) of a website visitor can append street address in support of a direct mail campaign.
iv. A retail brand better understands their customer’s demographic and behavioral make-up, by licensing Offline Graph with Marketing Attributes.
v. A connected TV (CTV) manufacturer increases audience reach and accurately quantifies the campaign impact for their advertising partners.

There must be some unique cases for the offline graph that may not be recognized widely yet; can you share some of your insights on this?
a. One unique use case that we’ve seen is using the Offline Graph to build a more complete profile of consumers who make in-store purchases. Brands with large numbers of in-store credit card transactions usually capture limited consumer data from those sales. These brands turn to Experian to license Offline Graph to resolve their partial data like email, phone number, or other geographic data points, such as a store’s trade area, to a known consumer. In doing so, they gain a more complete and accurate profile of their consumer, understanding who was already a customer versus who is a brand-new shopper, which helps them learn more about them and connect with them.

What kind of trends do you think will shape the future of offline and online data connectivity?
a. Privacy and addressability are two trends that will shape the future of connectivity:

i. Privacy: There will be an increase in the use of secure environments such as data clean rooms, in part fueled by improving user experiences. For example, data clean rooms will become more user-friendly in their ability to connect data sets and yield rich insights. Additionally, we will continue to see more identity solutions introduced into clean rooms, increasing the value of client data directly in the clean rooms. Using graph data directly in clean rooms simplifies how clients interact with and use graphs while still generating higher match rates, more resolved data, more valuable insights, and more accurate measurement.
ii. Consumer addressability: As traditional identifiers wane, a premium has been placed on first-party data and offline data. By licensing our Offline Graph, companies can enrich their first-party data by expanding the offline identifiers they resolve to customer profiles. This allows clients to maintain a more accurate and complete view of consumers and to reach them across more channels.

How can companies ensure they are effectively leveraging the data from the offline graph to enhance their marketing efforts?
a. The Offline Graph predominantly helps with three core use cases: resolution, linkage, and offline media.

i. Resolution: clients use Offline Graph to validate that their first-party data is accurate, build more complete consumer profiles, and use this solid data foundation to make accurate, data-driven decisions.
ii. Linkage: clients access more offline IDs via the Offline Graph that they can use to better match to first- or third-party data sets. Then, clients use this enriched data to execute more efficient marketing initiatives. With the interoperability of our products, clients can even execute offline linkages, powered by our Offline Graph, that improve digital addressability.
iii. Offline media: clients use the Offline Graph for media execution, whether it be direct mail or telemarketing efforts. Clients reach the right consumers using the Offline Graph’s accurate and numerous offline data points.
b. While these are three primary use cases, one of the best parts of the Offline Graph is that it’s flexible. We work with each customer to construct the Offline Graph to meet their needs.

How do you envision the future of advertising as it becomes increasingly data-centric?
a. Our mission at Experian Marketing Services is to power data-driven advertising through connectivity. One trend we see in data-driven advertising is advertisers moving from channel-specific to audience-first marketing campaigns. Our combination of data, identity, and activation can help marketers achieve this. With our connections across buy- and sell-side platforms, advertisers can define an audience once and reach them across channels. This enables marketers to deliver consistent messaging and coordinate ad delivery across all channels and devices.

What advice would you give to organizations considering the adoption of the offline graph?

a. Experian’s Offline Graph has existed for nearly three decades, assisting clients’ evolving use cases along the way. We recommend clients take stock of the data they have and the data needs that still exist. If clients think about their data as a puzzle, “is it complete” or “do you still have data needs?” If you find yourself with gaps in your puzzle, then reach out to Experian and we can provide you with those missing puzzle pieces. The result will be a complete view of your customers that you can use in your marketing.