Acxiom adds interest-based ShareThis data to its arsenal

While its LiveRamp division announced today a new identity consortium for ad tech, Acxiom unveiled on Wednesday a new partnership with ShareThis.

ShareThis provides those “share this” buttons you see on this and other websites, allowing users to quickly share links to content via social media or other avenues.

Those clicks create anonymized profiles of what interests people. Someone sharing, say, a page’s list of upcoming concert dates for Britney Spears obviously shows an interest in that musician.

But ShareThis might also know, through a cookie or mobile device ID, that this user also likes to share, say, concert dates for Irish music and stories about dogs.

Acxiom Senior Account Executive Anthony Passarelli pointed out to me that ShareThis has had a partnership with LiveRamp, which allowed lookalike matching around attributes to find a larger audience for ads and other marketing.

In other words, Britney Spears fans who like dogs and Irish music could be matched in LiveRamp with other Britney Spears fans, who might also like dogs and Irish music and therefore might be targeted for dog- or Irish music-related ads. Or anonymous ShareThis cookies might lead to identifying users through a connecting piece of information in LiveRamp’s IdentityLink, such as an email address.

Now, he said, the partnership with the parent company lets ShareThis data be ingested into Acxiom’s Audience Cloud, where it can similarly be modeled and expanded out to many more lookalike users, but anonymously. Acxiom deals with third-party anonymous data, while LiveRamp primarily uses first-party, identified data.

Or Acxiom can simply take the same model it has created with ShareThis data — Britney Spears fans who also like dogs and Irish music — and create a new audience segment from existing data. In any of these cases, ShareThis can resell and rebrand those segments, if it wants.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.