Acxiom knows all your secrets

A few weeks ago I hinted that consumer data aggregator Acxiom would soon announce a product that would likely give angina to many of us who are protective of our personal privacy. I urged people to opt out using Acxiom’s new AboutTheData portal. Now I can finally say why.

Yesterday, the not-so-little data broker from Little Rock unveiled its Audience Operating System (AOS) to the world. This isn’t a product for you or me. It’s a product for marketers – retailers, emailers, advertisers, lead generation services, yadda yadda -- anyone who who wants to sell you stuff by showing you a Web or email ad, sending you junk mail, or calling you during the middle of dinner.

AOS’s main claim to fame is that it is the only marketing database that can offer “a single view of the consumer” to any company that subscribes to it, says Chief Product and Engineering Officer Phil Mui, who offered me a demo of AOS via Webcast.

Say you’re an insurance company and you want to reach parents of newborns, says Mui. The insurance company doesn’t have an easy way of knowing which of its existing customers just had a baby, but Acxiom does. It can take the insurance company’s customer list, search for those in its database who, say, just registered with a diaper service, and then send a marketing pitch to just those people via a Facebook ad.

[Note: Acxiom says this example is inaccurate. For this and other objections, please see page three of this post.]

In the past it might have taken the insurance company days to match names between different databases, if they could do it at all. Using AOS they can do it in minutes, says Mui.

Pinning you down

The reason they can do this – really, the lynchpin of AOS – is something Acxiom calls “entity resolution.”

To the outside marketing world, you are not just one entity, you are many entities. If you filled out a Web registration form using your Gmail address, you’re one person to that site. If you ordered something from the LL Bean catalog over your landline, you’re a different person to the mail order house. When you use your corporate email address to sign up for a professional newsletter, you’re yet another person. Take a survey via cell phone? You’re now on entity number 4 and counting. That’s because all of these things are keyed to a different piece of identifying data (email address, phone number, etc).

Acxiom claims it can take all those disparate bits of you and, though the magic of its Abilitec data-matching algorithms, create one cohesive profile (a “Safe Haven”) that combines all of this information into one.

Suddenly you are no longer a dozen different people in Acxiom’s database; you are now one person. And the information you provided to that Web site is combined with your offline purchases from LL Bean, your mailing address, your cell number, your corporate email address, and every other bit of data Acxiom has managed to hoover up about you over the past four decades.

Don’t Acxiom, don’t tell

This is fabulous news for marketers and the people who love hearing from them. For consumers who aren’t so enamored of marketers and are jealous of their privacy, not so much.

The problem here is that you didn’t ask Acxiom to combine all your online and offline information together for your various identities. In fact, you might have good reasons for not wanting your ultra-liberal boss – or anyone else -- to know that you are a registered Libertarian who gives money to the Tea Party and subscribes to Guns and Gardens magazine. If she happens to be an AOS customer seeking people with exactly these attributes, she might.

Using different identities to hide certain facets of your life is a very common tactic. You’ve heard of security through obscurity? Call this privacy through promiscuity. Everyone gets a little slice of your data; nobody gets the whole pie. Until now, that is.

Chief Privacy Officer Jennifer Barrett-Glasgow emphasizes that Acxiom does not collect or use customer data without permission, and how it can use such data is limited by contracts with its clients and by law. Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, for example, this profile data can’t be used to determine eligibility for credit, insurance, or employment.

The problem, of course, is that in the vast majority of cases such permission is obtained automatically by the fine print inside a privacy policy nobody but geeks like me ever read. If that policy says the company collecting your data shares it with third parties, there’s a pretty good chance it’s in Acxiom’s database.

Acxiom also says the data only travels in one direction. It knows who those parents of newborns are, but the insurance company doesn’t – unless, of course, people click through the ads and reveal themselves.

Bottom line: Marketers are about to know a heckovalot more about you, including things you might not want them to. If that bothers you, best to opt out now before it’s too late.

UPDATE: Acxiom responds

After this post went live I heard from Acxiom CPO Jennifer Barrett-Glasgow, who objected to some of the hypotheticals I presented in my post, as well as my descriptions of what AOS does. I invited her to compose a response. It follows in full:

We feel there are some points in Dan’s blog that should be clarified.

The article refers to AOS as a marketing database that companies subscribe to. AOS is far more than a database. It is a marketing system that allows Acxiom’s clients to set up an environment in which they can manage data they have about their customers in combination with demographic and interest data they license from Acxiom to augment their understanding of the marketplace. It offers capabilities to analyze the data and execute advertising campaigns.

It is important to distinguish between the data an advertiser has about its marketing and advertising activities with customers and prospects and the data Acxiom brings to the marketplace to augment that data and provide more relevant offers. Acxiom’s data is collected from public records, surveys and from consumer facing companies who share customer purchase information with third parties. Most of these companies offer free services and support them through advertising and providing leads to other companies. The example of a diaper service is not a place Acxiom would get data about new parents. Instead it would more likely come from a survey or a registration for diaper coupons.

Acxiom’s entity resolution service is used in several ways. It links up data that Acxiom collects from various sources to create our marketing data products. It also links up data an advertiser has about their customers across channels. Finally, it provides the linkage needed for adding Acxiom to the client’s AOS environment. Maybe more importantly, it does not link up data between unknowing disparate entities as described in the example of the Web registration and ordering from LL Bean.

Acxiom does not have one cohesive profile that incorporates Acxiom marketing data with our advertising client’s data. Instead, we license the specific data elements that an advertiser wants and integrate them with our client’s customer data using the AOS.

It is important to also point out that the example of your boss learning about your financial support of the Tea Party or that you subscribe to Guns and Gardens magazine won’t happen from Acxiom. Our marketing data can only be used for marketing purposes, not for determining credit or insurance rates or for employment purposes.

For individuals who want to understand what data Acxiom has about them, instead of opting out as the article suggests, we recommend you visit www.AboutTheData.com and see for yourself what data has been collected. Then make your own decision about whether it is accurate, whether it should be corrected, whether you want to delete certain elements, or whether you want to completely opt-out. The choice is yours.

The article focuses mostly on Acxiom’s marketing data products which have been around for over 20 years, and does not give much detail on the new functionality of the system. The AOS is an open application platform - pre-loaded with Acxiom applications - that allows an advertiser to plan and execute targeted campaigns across the full range of media options, both online and offline, through the complete purchase funnel, from top to bottom. This is achieved through a deeply integrated, comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform utilizing industry-leading security and privacy compliance.

Acxiom clients now have the ability to:

1. Connect their online and offline audience data for advertising purposes only
2. Reach the best audiences across multiple channels
3. Analyze cross-channel campaign effectiveness and optimize accordingly

In addition to the applications, the AOS will allow a growing ecosystem of application developers and partners to integrate additional solutions via open, secure application programming interfaces (APIs). As a complete system, AOS helps reduce marketing waste and improve customer experiences.

Got a question about social media or privacy? TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan may have the answer (and if not, he'll make something up). Follow him on Twitter: @tynanwrites. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-to's, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

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