Is Inaccurate Data Draining Your Media Budget?
Chip Russo Explains How Truthset and The Trade Desk Are Bringing Transparency to Audience Data
Is the data powering your ad campaigns accurate? Chances are, it depends. And chances are, it’s costing advertisers anywhere from 30–60% of ad spend due to mistargeted audiences.
The Measure sat down with Chip Russo, CRO/President at Truthset, the company validating the consumer data powering the trillion-dollar advertising industry. We asked him about their latest partnership with The Trade Desk, and what it means for advertisers, data providers, and the broader media ecosystem.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited
Q: What problem is Truthset trying to solve for the advertising industry?
Chip Russo: There's a lot of essence within television around identity right now, and what we do is we add validity and accuracy to what they're building. Identity is the key component that stitches together all of the campaigns that are run, targeted, measured, and accuracy and validity is critical for that to exist and for them to be successful in their partnerships.
Data and audiences are an opportunity for buyers of data to ascertain the accuracy of what they're working with. So throughout the industry, I mean, any industry, there's variance in quality. Think about the car you drive, the coffee you drink, the gas you put in your tank. There's low quality, medium quality, and high quality. The data industry trades on about $1 trillion worth of value, but it's never had that same transparency.
Q: What are Data Rated Audiences?
Chip Russo: So Data Rated Audiences is the foray into allowing buyers choice, while at the same time providing data providers with new margin expansion opportunities. So it's a revolutionary thing that we've introduced to the market.
With Data Rated Audiences, in order to facilitate usage and open up that opportunity, we've done a lot of great partnerships with folks like The Trade Desk. So now you can go into The Trade Desk and understand: Is this a Triple-A rated audience that I'm going to activate against? Is there enough scale?
It's allowing buyers to not only tune the accuracy, but also tune the scale. So we're putting new controls into the marketplace, and The Trade Desk is one of the new locations where we'll be operating.
Q: What are you excited about for the future?
Chip Russo: Really excited about our role in the industry and how it permeates across all data providers and those that buy data.
What we're doing right now is working closely with data providers to help give them an independent voice — so they're not grading their own homework.
They're leveraging the insights and validation of Truthset to make their products stronger, while allowing them to operate in a marketplace with an independent arbiter of truth.