Alliant is always excited to bring forward viewpoints from companies that share a passion for innovative audience solutions. The Ally is a Q&A series where advertising industry movers and shakers share unique perspectives on audience data, the advertising landscape, and their personal approach to navigating an evolving industry.

In this edition of The Ally, Brent Gaskamp, Vice President of Audiences at TransUnion, shares his thoughts on how quality audience data can help advertisers overcome challenges and facilitate great omnichannel advertising.

Can you tell me more about TransUnion and your role there?

TransUnion® is a global insights and information company that specializes in data and connections that make trust possible across industries, verticals, and markets. The TruAudience® Marketing Solutions suite offers a wide range of audience planning, targeting, insights, and measurement tools — all powered by advanced identity — to help marketers and publishers alike achieve their goals and find clarity in today’s chaotic marketing landscape.

As the VP of Audience at TransUnion, I’m right in the middle of everything related to marketing audiences. I work with data providers like Alliant, activation endpoints, and our partners, including agencies, publishers, and brands. My goal is to make our team a go-to resource in all these areas, enabling TransUnion to offer the expertise needed to navigate today’s complex marketing world — no matter the role, channel, or specific use case.

Can you describe the partnership with Alliant and the overall importance of audience data to your company?

Audience data is the essential ingredient in our suite of TruAudience Marketing Solutions and the driving force behind the TruAudience Data Marketplace. This is where data buyers can build, model, and activate high-quality audiences using data from both TransUnion and trusted, high-quality data providers like Alliant. Also, sellers can make their data easily accessible to those same buyers. Alliant has been offering a fully compliant and unique source of transactional-based data built for DTC advertising success.

At TransUnion, we focus on ensuring our clients can access data whenever, wherever, no matter the use case. While the TruAudience Data Marketplace is integrated with a wide array of leading activation endpoints, we’re also heavily invested in data collaboration and private marketplace deals. In fact, we’re increasingly seeing collaboration between first- and third-party data as a necessity in the modern marketing ecosystem, so we’ve been building out capabilities accordingly.

How does having high-quality data drive great omnichannel advertising?

Without a strong foundation of data, it’ll be challenging, at best, to link activity across the wide breadth of platforms, channels and devices consumers interact with daily. The numbers back this up: According to research we recently commissioned with Forrester, 70% of marketing leaders said identifying audiences across multiple touchpoints is more difficult than ever.

We’ve been working to mitigate some of the logistical burdens associated with cross-channel marketing by offering consistent audience definition, allowing marketers to build audiences once and then distribute them infinitely to any channel, both direct and programmatic. This makes it possible for marketers to realize the true potential of omnichannel marketing, by delivering the right message to the right audience in the right context — no matter where that might be.

CPG is a key category for TransUnion. How are you overcoming some of the challenges facing CPG advertisers today?

CPG offers a lot of choices on where to execute campaigns, but historically, we’ve seen many CPG advertisers target similar audiences. They’re overpaying for impressions because there’s so much competition for the same type of data.

There are two ways to mitigate this. First, we’re seeing data marketplaces implement premium audience consultation services. This is something we offer through our own Audience Help Desk. In this regard, we value partnering with Alliant due to its enhanced CPG offering especially with custom audiences. This data is particularly powerful because it’s informed by receipt-level transaction data and enriched with consumer attributes.

Second, sophisticated custom audience targeting, the kind provided by a robust audience platform like TruAudience Data Marketplace, can equip CPG advertisers to build audiences that more closely match their desired traits. This helps them effectively reach specific customers without relying on off-the-shelf audiences.  Conquesting audience strategies to steal market share from competitive CPG brands can also be used by savvy advertisers through both custom and syndicated audiences activated in our marketplace.

Beyond that, two of the most interesting focus areas of CPG are understanding retail media networks and how curation evolves for them. For example, we see RMNs working with TransUnion to open up access to third-party audiences in addition to their first-party audiences. When combined, both types of data proves to drive stronger outcomes in RMNs than if clients were just using first-party data.

What are some new initiatives your organization has on the horizon to better serve customers?

In 2025, we’re investing heavily in our capabilities to meet customers where they are. Executing marketing and advertising campaigns is hard, and one-size-fits-all solutions just don’t work in today’s fragmented and chaotic marketing ecosystem. To that end, we’ve focused on ensuring our marketplace can be activated across a wide range of use cases — whether that’s providing a UI for partners to upload their first-party data for audience creation and modeling, delivering API solutions for reaching key endpoints and workflows, or making our data available in leading cloud data platforms.

We hope you found this edition of the Ally informative. If you would like to connect with Alliant and discuss audience data and TV advertising possibilities, please reach out. We would love to hear from you.