Nielsen links up with J.D. Power to create a new Auto Cloud

Audience measurement firm Nielsen announced this week it is launching an Auto Cloud that is integrated with the car sales data held by research firm J.D. Power and Associates.

This is the first time that J.D. Power’s data is being made available for advertising and measurement.

This exclusive combination, the companies said, will let auto advertisers segment and target audiences for online and TV campaigns based on car-related data, including car styles, customer buying stage, brand affinities, geolocation, recent purchases and other factors.

Advertisers will also be able to see attribution data that documents whether specific campaigns increased car sales.

Nielsen Executive Vice President Damian Garbaccio told me via email that “no one in the marketing technology or measurement industry offers a stack with this combination of data and capabilities.”

The Auto Cloud receives a daily feed of purchase data from Power, he added, compared to other marketplaces that have to wait longer for their data from other sources. AI in the Auto Cloud allows campaigns to react instantly to real-time changes in the data.

Garbaccio suggested the use case of a carmaker who wants to follow up a TV/radio brand-building campaign with a digital campaign to drive visits to dealerships.

Anonymized

Through the Nielsen Auto Cloud, he said, the advertising across display, mobile, search, social and email marketing can utilize a variety of attributes to segment and target anonymized audiences.

By marrying the Power sales data with the Nielsen audience info, the attributes can include the nearest dealer to a mobile device location; exposure of households to TV, connected TV and digital radio ads; patterns of behavior on car shopping/research sites like NADA guides; past purchase behavior going back four years; lease expiration within three months; and car preferences.

The data targeting can also suppress certain groups, such as buyers who are loyal to competing brands or have recently purchased a car.

The Power data on car sales is not available directly to the Auto Cloud, since it contains all kinds of personally identifiable information, such as car buyers’ names and addresses.

Instead, Garbaccio said, it is first run through a data matching provider like LiveRamp, which matches the data with its mountain of profiles via persistent identifiers like email addresses or street addresses. The resulting anonymized profiles from the data matching service contain mobile device IDs and online cookies that the Auto Cloud then uses for segmenting and targeting.

The Nielsen Auto Cloud can also add its device location data for more than 250 million devices and its records of individuals’ retail purchases and media consumption data across TV, digital or streaming audio.

Although anonymized, the ad targeting can be directed at an individual — and all of her devices, like laptop, tablet and phone — or all of the individuals in a given household.

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.