Xandr dataset: a look at a major platform’s audience segmentation

A new report in tech website The Markup explores some of the 650,000 audience segments on Microsoft’s Xandr platform, revealing at times a level of granularity that might struggle to shift the needle in anything other than the lowest-volume, highest-priced categories.

Why it matters: Are you who your data trail suggests you are?

The news

The Markup’s report, which includes a search function based on the dataset’s audience segments, is really quite granular in a way that many consumers would find intrusive, if not particularly surprising.

• The database includes segments based on ethnic, religious, or sexual identity as well as more politically centred ideas like military history, attitudes to key political figures, or major fault lines in the political conversation, such as gun control.
• The website does note that not all of these are targetable segments. Certain groupings are there to be avoided for brand safety reasons.
• The revelations are based on the discovery of a file by a privacy researcher at Cracked Labs who then shared the data with The Markup.
• Suppliers are varied but a handful of significant suppliers provide strong minorities of the data, including: Oracle (35.7%), LiveRamp (12.5%), Nielsen (10.1%), Eyeota (8.2%), and Factual (4.5%).

Analysis

There are two big questions here: is it right? And is it useful? 

In the first case, it’s just worth dwelling on how happy you would be if you were profiled based on purchases of sensitive products, a mental illness, or race. An important reminder: much of this data is based on a patchwork of triangulated sources – it is not 100% accurate.

Advertising has long pondered how it might “speak to” groups beyond the perceived majority or average, which is necessary. What’s much murkier is if you don’t want to be seen to be speaking to these groups in high-reach advertising, a deeply problematic impulse that recent convulsions over Bud Light have only intensified.

Similarly, at a time when reproductive health is not just a political talking point but now criminally punishable across several states of the US, the commercial justification for holding this data is troubling.

On the second question of utility, there are numerous examples of targeting ideas that are really too nuanced to judge from online behaviour, and presumably target samples so niche as to convert – but this is only as good as the broad demand that a brand has built.

Sourced from The Markup, WARC, Forbes