L’Oréal Head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, has spoken of the critical need for brands to test new data sources in order to close the gap between data quality for media activation, and for measurement and attribution, according to a report by adexhanger.com.

Speaking at IAB Data Symposium in New York City, Paramasivam highlighted the French beauty giant’s difficultly in assembling consumer profiles without having access to the direct data that e-commerce sites and retailers are privy to.

However, while retail partners are said to make active data easy in media campaigns, Paramasivam spoke of the difficulty in analytics.

She said, “For activation in programmatic, you want at least a million consumers per segment to find on the open exchange. It’s frustrating for us because the attribution and measurement decisions right now don’t have the granularity and data quality we’d like.”

It was the need for quality over quantity that Paramasivam urged brands to focus on, “What’s the fidelity of the data signal? How close to the direct consumer and to real time is the data? At the brand level, you’re very dependent on your ecosystem and the technology system holding it up.”

The company is said to have focused on this through partnerships with the likes of location data startup Factual, in order to target mobile audiences, and second party deals to reach other categories such as dating and fitness apps, which are said to offer value through “non-competing brands where there’s a synergy between customer sets.”