Marketing technology company Tapad today announced a global rebrand, in which it’s launching a new ‘Customer Data Platform’ (CPD) and renaming its device graph to ‘The Tapad Graph’. Tapad says the CPD will enable marketers to overlay their own first-party data on to the Tapad Graph, which it claims will strengthen their ability to identify engage both new and existing customers. The new product is only available to the telecommunications industry for now, but may be opened up to a wider user base in the future.
Tapad’s offering has always been centred around its device graph, which feeds customer data into an algorithm to try and figure out which devices are being used by the same individual. The company claims its graph has data on billions of devices, and says this data can be used to help advertisers deliver personalised messaging across devices.
The Customer Data Platform will act as a data handling service for marketers’ first and third party data, while also integrating insight from the device graph into this data. The company says this integration sets the product apart from similar tools, which aggregate a marketer’s first-party data, without necessarily layering new insights over the top.
Tapad’s parent company Telenor, which bought Tapad for $360 million back in 2016, has trialled the CDP on a few of its other subsidiaries, and claims to have seen significant results. Telenor gave an example of an unnamed subsidiary in the Nordics, which used the CDP to target competitors’ customers on old Samsung phones and found a 34 percent reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA) and a 27 percent lift in conversion rate as a result.
Telenor Group CMO Svein Henning Kirkeng says the CDP will provide particular value for identifying and engaging with new customers. “With Tapad’s ability to merge data from previously siloed systems, we can coherently engage with customers across the different channels in which we operate. Furthermore, we’re able to leverage our insights to identify new potential customers with similar attributes, and deliver a personalized value proposition,” he said.
Any new product operating in the EU involving data handling will inevitably spark concerns around compliance with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Tapad describes the new platform as ‘privacy-safe’, though it seems it’s not GDPR compliant quite yet, as the company said that “the Tapad CPD and Tapad’s wider product suite are nearing GDPR compliance for May 2018.”
The news marks the next step in something of a streamlining of the company, which handed its media services division over to Brand Networks in a deal last month. Tapad’s CEO Sigvart Voss Eriksen said at the time that the deal would allow Tapad to focus on expanding its core identity offering, and this looks to be the first example of that expansion.
