With Tapad Partnership, Freckle IoT Extends Scale of Audience Data
A new partnership between the technology vendors Freckle IoT and Tapad, announced this morning, could have major implications in the way international brands handle cross-device offline attribution.
As of today, brands using Freckle’s offline attribution solutions will be able to take advantage of Tapad’s Device Graph for more granular attribution data. The collaboration will also combine Freckle’s persistent location data with Tapad’s proprietary cross-device technology, giving brands better information about how media being consumed across mobile and desktop devices is impacting real world sales at physical stores.
Tapad’s Device Graph is used by media companies, direct brand marketers, agencies and other vendors across multiple verticals. With this new partnership in place, Freckle’s large retail clients will have the ability to monitor consumer behaviors and determine which channels are most successful in driving sales.
“This is important for international brands who are not looking for a single solution in every market, but rather a common methodology in every market that they operate in — Freckle can now provide offline attribution in any and all markets a brand is in,” says Freckle IoT CEO Neil Sweeney.
Cross-device measurement has become increasingly relevant in recent years, and Sweeney sees this new partnership between Freckle and Tapad as a natural extension of that trend. He says a number of firms have been working on cross-device to look at how individuals on various devices ultimately migrate to physical locations.
“In this case, we are taking two best in class solutions — Tapad at cross-device and Freckle at offline attribution — and putting them together,” he says. “This is seamless and powerful.”
Today’s news comes just five months after Freckle announced another major partnership with Cisco, in a move that saw Freckle tapping into Cisco’s Meraki access points. As part of that partnership, Freckle also became a member of Cisco’s Solution Partner Program.
As Sweeney sees it, these partnerships are part of a larger industry-wide push toward multi-touch attribution.
“As a company who aspires to be the global leader in offline attribution, we are of the premise that brands will want to look at all of their media channels and vendors to determine what is driving the most impact,” he says. “This is an incredibly complicated data science problem, and one that is not solved over night, but brands must start embracing this right now.”
As it stands right now, Freckle helps brands track the effectiveness of their campaigns by independently matching media spend to in-store visits. By partnering with Tapad, Freckle will be able to extend its own data set and allow brands to access additional deterministic and probabilistic data for analyzing consumer behavior ahead of an in-store purchase.
If that seems like a mouthful, it’s because it is. Sweeney sees knowledge, or a lack of understanding about what is possible, as the biggest barrier preventing more brands from addressing the online-to-offline disconnect. And he says offline attribution is the foundation from which all brands and clients will some day build their multi-touch models from.
“Viewability and fraud have dominated the conversation until now,” he says. “There is no situation where offline attribution does not become a core metric moving forward. In fact, it represents a much better proxy than viewability does to purchase … That is the future of media and it starts with offline attribution in a single channel.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
