Dive Brief:

• Publicis data-marketing company Epsilon last week launched two partnerships that seek to boost its offering around connected TV. 
• The company on June 7 partnered with credit reporting agency TransUnion to make its data available to TransUnion's TruAudience Data Marketplace, connecting audience insights from its database of 250 million U.S. consumers to TransUnion's household identity graph of more than 80 million U.S. homes.
• In a separate move, Epsilon expanded its relationship with iSpot.tv to boost the CTV measurement and reporting capabilities of Epsilon PeopleCloud by coupling Epsilon's CORE ID with iSpot's Unified Measurement capabilities. The partnerships seek to meet the evolving needs of brands advertising in the growing CTV ad space.

Dive Insight:

Epsilon's moves to boost its capabilities around targeting and measuring campaigns come as the channel continues to grow despite persistent issues like fragmentation that could hamper its ability to meet its full potential. CTV ad spend increased 57% in 2021 to $15.2 billion, and is expected to grow an additional 39% in 2022 to $21.2 billion, more than doubling between 2020 and 2022, per IAB’s “2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook."

TransUnion claims its data deal with Epsilon is one of the largest such partnerships across CTV, smart speakers and gaming consoles. By connecting Epsilon insights to TransUnion's identity graph, brands and agencies will be able to create custom audiences and better personalize marketing messages across channels. The integration uses many digital signals and personal identifiers, making it a viable way to target consumers even amid the deprecation of cookies and tightening of other privacy rules.

"As mobile IDs and cookies continue to deprecate, having the ability to leverage audiences from Epsilon in an ID-agnostic way across our leading activation partners will enable greater scale and reach," said Michelle Swanston, TransUnion's vice president of media and entertainment and head of Data Marketplace, in a press release.

TransUnion, alongside Equifax and Experian, is one of the three largest credit reporting agencies and commands large troves of consumer data. The company several years ago began acquiring marketing and advertising tech companies as it sought to prepare for a cookieless future. After buying mar-tech platform TruSignal, marketing company Signal and overt-the-top measurement provider Tru Optik, TransUnion continued its spree last fall by acquiring identity resolution provider Neustar for $3.1 billion. Its tie-up with Epsilon is the company's latest move to be a bigger player in the evolving identity space.

By expanding its relationship with iSpot.tv, Epsilon can also address the other end of the CTV issue by improving its measurement and reporting capabilities. ISpot.tv is now the default measurement option for verifying incremental reach campaigns using Epsilon's CTV platform over linear. The partnership ties Epsilon's privacy-protected CORE ID to iSpot's measurement capabilities, in another nod to how marketers are looking for ID tools that don't rely on cookies.

Epsilon in a press release said it has worked with multiple CPG brands to run campaigns designed to drive awareness and engagement across channels including CTV, and that thanks to the expanded integration with iSpot, brands will be able to move beyond learning just verification and reach but understanding the net audiences and frequency of ad exposures on the platform.

Agencies, platforms and media companies have been working to improve targeting and measurement amid the growth of CTV and the looming deprecation of third-party cookies. Epsilon parent Publicis this year became the first company to test NBCUniversal's partnership with iSpot, which it named as a preferred measurement partner.

Publicis Groupe in April reported overall organic growth of 10.5% for Q1 2022, far outpacing the 2.8% figure notched in Q1 2021. The company reiterated that Epsilon, which it acquired in 2019, and Publicis Sapient are at the core of its business model, responsible for a third of the group’s business and clear drivers of its overall growth.