Attribution continues to change, becoming more sophisticated and increasingly complex.  For example, a recent partnership between Placed and Kantar brings together offline and online advertising, and offline purchases.

While Placed brings location data such as where and what time the consumer saw an ad, Kantar brings the anonymous purchase behavior data.

Kantar’s partnership integrates AdIntelligence data and Shopcom purchasing data into Placed Attribution.

The combination of Placed’s best-in-class understanding of location-based activity associated with 300 million smartphones consumer behavior will enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of how they  budget ad buys, directly linking ad exposure to store visits and actual product purchase and spending data.

Jim Watson, senior vice president of strategy and operations at Placed, which pioneered store tracking, said it’s not enough to know that consumers visited a store. It’s more important to know if they made a purchase.

The new relationship also included connected and linear ad inventory for television, Watson said.

When asked how Placed keeps up with the rate of change in attribution, he said it’s focused on adding channels like out-of-home, mobile and television. The next logical step is to measure purchases. The partnership with Kantar will enable this. 

The Kantar and Placed partnership was led by Data Alliance, a WPP company that develops data-focused partnerships across the WPP network.

Connecting offline data with online data raises the bar when it comes to serving and seeing relevant ads. But what about the “invisible” relationships between consumers and brands, as referenced by Katie Casavant, chief executive officer at Kantar Activate and Kantar Worldpanel Shopcom?

These invisible relationships are the ads that don’t necessarily market or advertise the product the consumer purchases, but rather trigger a reminder or an interest.

“People expect brands to consider the moment they’re in when they receive messages,” Casavant said. “In the future, consumers will increasingly reject messages that don’t feel tailored to them. They want to be understood.”

Casavant agrees that with machine learning and artificial intelligence, the greater, more precise quantity of information will bring on the “invisible” relationship outlining the different parts of human behavior.

“Can invisible relationships be drawn?” she said. “There’s no doubt that technology will enable this, but more importantly, will become the accuracy of the data going into the equation. I’m not personally certain that every single bit of human behavior will be predicted by a machine.”