“Epsilon does not have any data from NinthDecimal that was the subject of the FTC settlement,” said a spokesperson for the company.
InMarket, in a statement, said, “All of InMarket’s solutions, including audience segments, are compliant with applicable industry standards and legal requirements, and our organization has implemented market-leading, privacy-forward standards for years.”
An FTC spokesperson said the commission won’t comment on whether a company is complying with its order, including whether third parties that store NinthDecimal data are covered by it or whether the order treats segments differently than the raw data they’re based on.
Complicating things further, InMarket is now closer to being a direct competitor of Publicis. In August it bought ChannelMix, a Kansas City, Missouri-based firm that handles analytics that shape media plans for a wide range of clients, with reported combined annual billings of $12 billion.
More questions for brokers
Epsilon’s data retention raises questions, but it also means the Publicis unit has a lot of accurate data, and it appears meticulous in labeling the partner sources of that data, while Acxiom and Experian don’t appear to do so in many cases.
An Experian spokeswoman, on the apparent co-mingling of my record with that of an unknown 86-year-old, said: “Without being able to assess the record directly, the most likely scenario is that there is an error in the source data that contributed to this specific record.”
Experian, which also runs a credit reporting business, is prohibited by law from co-mingling my credit report (which I believe is accurate) with data they sell for marketing. Good thing.
Acxiom spurred a host of quality-related questions, including the wrong address in Little Rock, wrong email addresses and apparently modeled speculation about my sleep quality and interests in medicines and procedures (correct on allergy meds, wrong on the colonoscopy, and right at least in part on the likelihood of getting a flu shot, since I come up anywhere from 2 to 5 on a 5-point likelihood scale in different entries).
An IPG spokesman said the incorrect Little Rock address and wrong email addresses, including my daughter’s, were not in the database used by clients. On how Acxiom knows about such things as my likelihood to get a colonoscopy or a flu shot, he declined to name specific sources but said the underlying data is “collected via licensing from vetted, reputable companies, and are not inferences created by Acxiom.”
Acxiom’s data processing governance rules and logic, he said, “help us weed out the data points in the data we have collected that are no longer, or never were, relevant to/associated with you.”
Wrong turns for marketers
Even so, caveat emptor.
One thing that stands out from all the providers is how much “data” they have about automotive history and intent, and how often it’s wrong. It’s all the more puzzling because all of them used historical vehicle registration records to create screening questions used when I accessed my data records in the first place. So at least they should know what I bought and own.
On automotive data, I also found my LexisNexis file had an erroneous traffic conviction, which I went through the laborious process of correcting. That can cost you on insurance. My rate went down 2% after LexisNexis fixed the error.
Other classification errors probably add up to a lot more wasted money for automotive marketers.
Data brokers should know, for example, I’ve never owned an SUV, though none seem to. Despite numerous data broker inferences, I am never buying an SUV, a Lincoln or a Nissan Sentra or a Jeep (I’ve rented Jeeps, but one dropped a part in South Dakota and another stopped running on the road in California due to an overheated transaxle).
Look back: Nearly half the data used for ad targeting is wrong
Arielle Garcia, former chief privacy and responsibility officer of Interpublic’s UM and later director of intelligence for digital watchdog group Check My Ads, has done a similar investigation of her data records, and also found lots of erroneous and contradictory results.
Her data profiles included a child she never had and classifications of her anywhere from below poverty level income to high net worth. From just one broker, she said she found herself in more than 500 audience segments, which she characterized as “a mix of wildly inaccurate, useless and questionable. I was in the market for just about every vehicle, even though I don’t drive. I was a defense contractor, but I also was in agriculture and foodservice.”
She recommends marketers make similar requests for their own data records, particularly from vendors they or their agencies work with or intend to work with, before they spend money on data. Brokers or data providers that won’t comply should be ruled out, she said.
Garcia said marketers often don’t know what data sources their agencies use, even though she believes that information should be specified in requests for proposal.
Her main takeaway was that audiences built from such data are largely useless for marketers. And, while the pushback is that this will just empower big digital platforms Google and Meta due to their massive first-party data advantage over other media companies, that’s not the only possibility, Garcia said. For one thing, her look at Meta audience segments she fell into contained plenty of questionable conclusions, too.
“We’re ignoring the incentive that they have to create as many inferences and put you in as many audience segments as they can,” she said.
The better answer for marketers, she said, may be pulling back on using personal information in favor of drawing inferences where the signals are more solid and verifiable, such as media context.
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UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: The story has been updated with comments from Epsilon in cases where the company previously had declined to comment on the record and to clarify the paraphrase of a comment from Circana Exec VP Mike Ellgass that Epsilon has the right to retain Circana data and consumer segments indefinitely.