AUSTIN, TX (March 7 , 2017) Affinity Answers, a platform for predictive branding powered by affinity algorithms that measure social data across 60,000 brands and 400 million people worldwide, today announced a partnership with LiveRamp™ a leading provider of omnichannel identity resolution. Through the partnership, Affinity Answers will make its social media audience data actionable across the digital ecosystem including in premium and mobile publishers, demand-side platforms (DSPs), and other media platforms.

Affinity Answers gauges the level of reciprocal, highly interactive social media activities (e.g., commenting, posting photos and videos, etc.) between brand audiences showing which fans of one brand have the highest affinity for another brand. By scoring audiences according to social engagement (i.e., “act-alike” modeling) the company can predict which audiences will be receptive to any particular brand and are therefore more likely to respond favorably.  Key use cases include gaining incremental insight to current customers and their brand affinity, while identifying target audiences with affinities to competitive brands.

LiveRamp’s IdentityLink™ resolves this data to a privacy-compliant consumer identifier leveraged by hundreds of brands and technology platforms for people-based marketing. In so doing, LiveRamp allows Affinity Answers to connect their data to brands’ people-based marketing initiatives and extend the reach of the data across channels, maximizing the potential for monetization.

“Affinity Answers approaches social affinity by recognizing that mutual affinity – a brand’s fans liking a TV show, for example, and in turn that TV show’s fans liking your brand – is key to identifying a brand’s most qualified addressable audiences,” says Sree Nagarajan, Affinity Answers’ CEO. “This is actionable data that goes beyond demographic targeting and positively impacts branding KPIs, such as video completion rates at twice the industry norm. We are pleased to offer this capability to marketers through our partnership with LiveRamp.”

“Affinity Answers provides a data set that helps brands find qualified addressable audiences with significant reach,” says Luke McGuinness, head of data partnerships at LiveRamp. “LiveRamp’s IdentityLink data store and identity resolution capabilities help marketers employ Affinity Answers’ data to gain new insights about customers, build loyalty, and reach new prospects.”

LiveRamp, an  Acxiom® company (NASDAQ: ACXM), offers brands and the companies they work with identity resolution that is integrated throughout the digital ecosystem, and provides the foundation for omnichannel marketing. Our services transform the technology platforms used by our clients into people-based marketing channels that improve the relevancy of marketing, and ultimately allow consumers to better connect with the brands and products they love. LiveRamp is an Acxiom company, delivering privacy-safe solutions to market and honoring the best practices of leading associations including the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) ICON and App Choices programs.

Affinity Answers Used by brands, agencies and ad tech companies for activation, planning (media, creative, sponsorships), measurement, and strategic insights, Affinity Answers measures across 60,000 brands and 400 million users worldwide the level of reciprocal, highly interactive social media activities to go beyond standard “look-alike” audiences to discover and activate higher performing “act-alike” segments for programmatic, social, or TV advertising. Its advanced machine learning technology is an unprecedented cross-channel recommendation engine that informs marketers about their audiences’ preference for thousands of TV shows, websites, apps, movies, music artists, and other consumer brands.

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Austin TX, Affinity Answers has offices in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Bangalore.