Jay Stocki
SVP, Data and Product, Experian

A majority of online shoppers consider consistency as a very important aspect of their buying experience. Marketers that offer a personalized shopping experience create a noticeable influence on buyers who prefer consistent branding along the journey. Now, customer data is critical to driving consistent branding across all marketing and advertising channels. To understand how marketers should use data to enhance customer experience and improve engagement, we spoke to Jay Stocki, Senior Vice President, Data and Product Strategy of Targeting, Experian.

MTS: Tell us about your role and the team you handle?
Jay Stocki: My role is to lead the product and data strategy team for Experian’s Marketing Services division. We focus on helping marketers utilize our data to help better understand their customers, and how to deliver the right marketing message, to the right person, at the right time. Our ConsumerView database is the leading third-party data source in the market today.

MTS: How do you use data to enhance the customer experience and improve omnichannel engagement?
Jay: The customer must be at the heart of every marketing strategy. To successfully acquire new customers, or keep a solid relationship with existing ones, a marketer needs to create and deliver personalized messages that center on and resonate with the customer. At Experian, our comprehensive ConsumerView database underpins our entire approach to help brands better connect with their customers. Marketers use our data in four major ways. The first use of our data is to determine who the right customers are to reach. The second use is around channel: marketers can use our data to gain insight into channels and devices customers are most likely to use when engaging with brands. Third, our data also helps marketers determine what messages will resonate best with customers. The final use of our data is for attribution and measurement, so marketers can make adjustments to campaigns and optimize content throughout their omnichannel strategies.

MTS: How does Experian uncover the potential of social media marketing platforms to deliver better and more relevant messages to audiences?
Jay: All good marketers today have realized having more quality customer data is a good thing. Most marketers are in the process of building the tools to manage their first-party CRM data and working with companies, like Experian for their third-party data. The missing piece of the puzzle is consumer-generated data: What consumers are saying and doing naturally? How do you understand the unprompted interactions that are occurring on social media? How do you understand a user’s authentic interests, attitudes, and experiences with a brand? Social media is the key. We have four ways to help marketers: Social Media Models helps predict who to target. Social Media Analysis to gain insight on any social media audience. Social Media Linkage to help connect existing data to social media, and Social Media Data Appends to help enrich first-party data with follower information and other custom social data.

MTS: At Experian, how do you utilize AI/ML technologies to work through unstructured sets of customer data?
Jay: We examine and leverage unstructured data to generate business insights in a variety of ways – but when we apply machine learning, we’re able to uncover deep insight. We have a research and development group, called the Experian DataLabs, where we use breakthrough experiments to create a better tomorrow for our clients and customers – constantly testing new data sets and new tools for insights. In fact, we work with many major brands to give them a ‘sandbox’ where we can help them employ the latest ML/AI techniques to improve their understanding of what is possible with their data.

MTS: Given the rate of MarTech and SalesTech adoption, how do you see businesses lacking a digital footprint for product reviews and customer experience faring beyond 2020?
Jay: If you aren’t maximizing your ability to get customer feedback data, you will be supplanted by somebody who does.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jay.
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