Meet Our Partners: Q&A with Alliant

TruAudience^® solutions enable the marketing ecosystem to leverage data and identity with trust. In this series, we will introduce the partners who are critical to our success.

Can you tell me more about Alliant and what your role is there?

I run the Digital and TV Partnership business at Alliant. This involves managing the teams responsible for dozens of platform partnerships across the DSPs, SSPs, data exchanges and clean rooms necessary for audience activation. I simultaneously lead the agency team that drives demand with holding companies and independent agencies — including the brands they represent — to leverage Alliant audiences in market. Alliant has also structured an advanced TV team to work specifically with MVPDs, publishers and content owners. We’re a small but mighty team and our data is available wherever a brand or agency wants to target their campaigns.

What verticals does Alliant audiences specialize in?

Alliant audiences excel across verticals, proving our transactional data source is highly predictive for many business models and industries. Top users of our data include multichannel retailers — especially DTC brands, insurance, financial services, telcom and auto.

What do you want media buyers to know about the data and methodology Alliant uses to build audiences?

Quality and compliance matter. Permissioned, aggregated transactional data combined with proven data science is critical to our data product. We always start with raw, deterministic transaction data — even when modeling — and apply the same data science discipline we use for our direct clients. We don’t cut corners when creating our audiences — and their performance proves it.

What’s a key challenge Alliant data and audiences help media buyers solve for?

There’s a lot of data available in-market; helping media buyers sift through the noise so they can achieve their campaign goals is key to our success. Today’s agencies are charged to do more by their brands. We serve as audience consultants to help media buyers define, create and distribute audiences, helping them achieve their clients’ campaign goals and look smart while doing so.

The media and advertising ecosystem has changed a lot in the last decade. What are some ways Alliant has evolved to keep up?

An expanding identity infrastructure is key to ensuring Alliant’s audiences are future-proofed and available across the entire ecosystem. We're established with leading identity solutions as well as direct mapping by hashed email for data distribution. Staying on the edge of emerging technology and channel shifts is equally important. We've built out an advanced TV business, and collaborated with TV publishers and content owners to help deliver addressable campaigns — while at the same time developing partnerships with data collaboration platforms and clean rooms to aid in leveraging first-party data.

What trends are you seeing with first-party data usage in connected TV (CTV)?

First-party data is just starting to be used for targeting in CTV, but the reality is very few brands have enough data to achieve successful outcomes, not to mention the fact targeting known customers doesn’t help in acquisition campaigns. We work with brands to not just enrich first-party data for targeting but to also model on relevant datasets (often their own first-party data) to deliver expanded audience reach. Leveraging a brand's first-party data to find new customers who “buy like” existing customers may be a new aspect to TV but not to Alliant. This is where we thrive.

What do you think is most important when it comes to data targeting on CTV?

Pseudonymized, PII-based audiences are crucial. Data quality doesn’t need to be compromised in CTV! This is one area where cookies should be dead and gone. Audience targeting across the entire buying path should be 100% based upon properly permissioned and compliant identity.

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Matt Frattaroli Bio:
With over a decade of experience in adtech and ecommerce, Matt leads Alliant’s Digital and Agency Partnership teams. His enthusiasm for innovation and relationship building has led to the growth of Alliant’s unmatched distribution network, close-knit agency partnerships and new, innovative Advanced TV data integrations.

Matt is an industry thought leader who contributes to The Drum, AdWeek NY, Streetfight and more on topics like the future of third-party data, data quality and advanced TV. His professional roots are deep in the digital marketing space — having built multiple ecommerce and MarTech companies, including ChoiceStream. In 2015, Matt was recognized by Digiday as a Signal Award Finalist in Data Management and Marketing for his work with consumer polling validation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business management and marketing from Cornell University.

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