That’s according to one ad agency exec using proprietary technology to maintain audience relationships as accepted targeting methods wane.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Karin Mihkels, EVP, Partnerships & Business Development at Matterkind.
Three new trends
Matterkind is the new name for Cadreon, the Interpublic Group addressable media unit that was aimed at making better use of data.
It leverages assets from IPG data company Acxiom, which the agency holding group previously acquired.
That is timely, because Mihkels says ad buyers are having to respond to the withering of traditional ad targeting techniques, thanks to three trends:
- “The degradation of the cookie.”
- “A lot of brands recognise that they enjoy access to a lot of valuable first-party data.”
- “A lot more regulations coming to the marketplace.”
The identity grab
Across the industry, people are transitioning to replace those traditional methods with techniques that are more about gaining direct audience relations, with permission.
Mihkels says that is possible using technology.
“We have a proprietary set of tools which enable us to, first and foremost, create audiences, addressable audiences – proxies, people – and then find those audiences across any digital addressable media platform and drive performance and results by creating a feedback loop,” she says.
“(It is a) fast feedback loop that enables us to see how that performance is delivering against specific audiences and optimising in real time. Identity becomes core to that. And so it’s really at the centre of what we do at Matterkind.”
Audience expectations
It is one more piece of the industry’s grand transition from indiscriminate data use to leveraging real audience data.
That shift is resetting the balance of power. Audiences, if they are to be expected to sign up and give their data, are expecting something in return.
“They recognise that this needs to be a value exchange that they’re comfortable with,” Mihkels sees.
“If they’re going to share their personal information, they want to be able to get something valuable in exchange.
One-to-one-marketing
That is why publishers and brands themselves are involved in concerted efforts to provide content and experiences that may compel consumers to provide email addresses or complete forms, for example.
“Addressability is about one-to-one marketing, so reaching a specific individual regardless of channel, and that’s where we’re trying to go,” says Matterkind’s Mihkels.
“It’s the ability to really focus on reaching that customer, regardless of channel.
“Not a channel centric strategy or approach to marketing, it’s really an audience centric approach to marketing. And it’s easy to say, it’s not as easy to do.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by TransUnion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view of one ad-tech exec who says advertisers may have to accept that what comes after cookies is several different solutions altogether.
But Ryanne Laredo, Amobee Chief Customer Officer, says that it’s perfectly possible to stitch together those solutions in a meaningful way, so that advertisers can benefit frmo an overdue upgrade to traditional ad-tech infrastructure.
Shifting norms
Three main trends are challenging accepted ad techniques:
- Third-party cookies are being deprecated.
- Privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA are forcing advertisers and platforms to move to opt-in tracking.
- But advertisers and publishers may be sitting on first-party audience data, or at least an opportunity to collect it – more valuable than old methods.
Laredo explains why this emerging ecosystem will be an improvement, not a downgrade.
Amobee’s Ryanne Laredo: Combatting Covid-19 Misinformation with Industry Partners
After the cookie
“There’s so much in the news about the dire straits that our industry is in because of privacy and technology challenges that are pending or changes that are pending,” Laredo says.
“I have a different POV on that.
“What we previously had in our reliance on cookie was not the best for consumers, and it also wasn’t ever fully realised potential. Cookies were really a hack on a hack and we need to do better.
“Every challenge gives us an opportunity to rethink what is the balance of personalization and privacy for consumers.”
Join Amobee on December 17th as we discuss the necessity of creating a future-proof consumer identity strategy in a conversation with Philip Smolin, @Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and @MolsonCoors' Megan Sullivan. Click here to register: https://t.co/FrCfmTT8Ln
— Amobee (@amobee) December 1, 2020
Patchwork of solutions
Technologies are being put in place to enable that future, of course. But, thanks to that and to different marketers’ different data maturities, Laredo doesn’t imagine any single one of them being a direct replacement.
Rather, we are emerging toward a patchwork of solutions.
“I don’t believe there’s a one size fits all,” she says. “There are people who are data-rich who have one-to-one relationships, a lot of e-commerce platforms who already have the necessary consent to do highly personalised advertising, but, in those cases, they don’t necessarily have the opportunity to pass that consent outside of their own walls.
“A big focus is having an ability to just tie different solutions together because not everyone is going to choose this same identity partner.
“Then there are advertisers who I wouldn’t consider data-poor, but have less one-to-one relationships in a digital world with consumers and they must have a way to enrich the information that they have.”
Our investments into innovation extend beyond beverages. We are partnering with @LiveRamp and @Amobee to develop an alternative to the third-party cookie. Get the scoop from @mikejuangnews in @adage: https://t.co/PG9awu7peA
— Molson Coors Beverage Company (@MolsonCoors) November 23, 2020
Key considerations
Laredo says balancing interoperability for privacy, consent and identity solutions is paramount to advertisers’ success.
She is encouraging advertisers to consider three factors as they do so:
- Establishment: “What does your current one-to-one relationship look like? Is it necessary to maintain the level of information that you have about those consumers? Do you have their permission?”
- Enrichment: “How do you enrich that relationship with the consumer so they know that you care about their privacy? How do you have this two way conversation that says, ‘I care about your privacy, but I’m going to use data to make your experience better and that value exchange is understood and able to be’?”
- Interconnection: “Utilising the right technologies that can interact between partners to honour that relationship and that value exchange that you have gathered from your customers or from consumers as a whole.”
Partner for personalization
Just as there will be no one-size-fits-all solution, no one company in isolation can bring results to customers.
Laredo says Amobee relies on partnerships with data companies like TransUnion, Tapad and LiveRamp to enable “data-rich strategies”.
She says connected TV is going to be a big focus in 2021, after TransUnion published a study suggesting a 70% increase in consumers’ time investment in the channel.
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ll look back two years from now, and consumers will say, ‘I wish we just had cookies again, because I can delete those — and I didn’t have to log in and hit ‘accept’ on every site I go to,'” Jay Friedman, president of data-driven advertising agency Goodway Group, said in this interview with Matt Spiegel, executive vice president of marketing solutions and head of media vertical at TransUnion.
Google this year announced it would end support for third-party cookies, which are data files that websites put on browsers to help track consumers’ online activities, in its Chrome browser by 2022. Because Chrome is a popular way for consumers to use the internet, Google has a significant effect on the digital advertising industry.
Source: eMarketer, Winterberry Group
If the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome weren’t enough of a challenge, Apple this year said an updated version of the software that runs its iPhone, iPad and Apple TV streaming devices will show an opt-in alert. The notification will tell Apple customers when apps want access to the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), a randomized number the company assigns to its devices that helps to track audiences and serve targeted ads in apps. Apple had planned to implement the change this year, but pushed back the date to early next year to help app developers prepare.
As these changes hinder audience tracking, consumers may become more frustrated with ads that aren’t targeted, but are still intrusive, Friedman said.
“If unaided, consumers would rather see ads that are relevant to them — because you’re going to see ads either way,” he said.
More First-Party Data
First-party data that consumers share directly with advertisers and publishers will become more valuable in marketing communications as the third-party cookie becomes diminished.
“It forces everyone to get their first-party data in order,” Friedman said. “When before, we really didn’t know the name of the person we were targeting very often. Now, we will.”
Measuring the effectiveness of campaigns will still be a priority, even it is more challenging without third-party cookies. Friedman said advertisers and their agencies will continue to use the tools they have, while developing new tools on a parallel track.
“Getting our first-party data in order as a marketer is a no-brainer, regardless of what happens,” Friedman said. “Getting comfortable with the idea of incrementality as a metric is a good idea, regardless of what happens.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TransUnion. For more videos, please click here.
]]>Now the JV that is OpenAP wants to start piecing together viewers themselves.
OpenAP’s first act was all about semantics – unifying how the networks described attributes they make available for data-driven buying.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ed Davis, OpenAP Chief Product Officer, says OpenAp’s next act is to focus on identity.
Multi-screen users
“Over the next 12 months, our goal is to unlock a cross-platform evolution on our core use cases,” he says.
“Our goal is to evolve the three primary use cases we have in planning, optimization, and measurement, to include cross-platform capabilities.
“Underneath any cross-platform pursuit really is this notion of having an identity for your consumer, for the viewer – identity and data describing the viewer data, describing what the viewer is consuming.
“That’s really important to OpenAP as we pursue any cross-platform extensions to what we’re doing.”
OpenAP is hiring! We're looking for a Director/VP of Product to join our team. This is a rare opportunity to join a company early and be part of building solutions that will shape the future of advanced TV. Learn more here: https://t.co/ur5eGpJOX5 pic.twitter.com/UE95cApBOv
— OpenAP (@OpenAPTV) November 19, 2020
Ad identity
Launched three years ago, OpenAP last year made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns.
The latest initiative would mark OpenAP’s own foray in to a space that is consuming everyone in advertising – identity graphs.
Specifically, though, Davis says OpenAP would want to make such a graph out of existing data points.
Co-mingled data
“When we think about an identity graph, when we think about the existing solutions out there,” Davis says.
“There’s been a lot of data environments that have been created that are now supporting this co-mingling of data in safer ways – being able to take identity data from one data vendor collector and put it into a safe environment where it can be combined with data from another data provider.
“For us, our goal at OpenAP is to be able to accept data from an agency or brand and match that up with a measurement data or audience activation data set, and then be able to share the result, be able to share the audience segment with any publisher that the agency or brand would like to explore campaigns with.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But, before it can get there, the technology will have to overcome in-built identity-tracking deficiencies at a time when some of the digital ad industry’s foremost identity technologies are disappearing.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jessica Hogue, Innovid GM for Measurement & Analytics, explains what will happen.
Cookie-less TV
Third-party tracking cookies are being deprecated whilst tech vendors are also tightening up on advertiser user of other device identifiers.
For Hogue, and the whole of connected TV, however, that is familiar territory, because many CTV devices don’t support system-level identifiers like cookies anyway.
“It’s cookie-less by nature,” she says. “Cookies don’t operate in the connected TV environment. So the future really looks to having much more of a modern approach that allows for those principles of privacy and interoperability.
“I think that that includes a mix of panels and different integration of different, whether it’s identity or first party data.”
Rip and replace?
That makes CTV the canary in the mineshaft for the big change that is happening in digital advertising – the move from tracking mechanisms like cookies toward more of an opted-in use of real audience data.
Across the industry, vendors are rushing to offer stand-in solutions in a world of disappearing cookies. But Hogue doesn’t think the idea of “repeal and replace” is the optimum one.
“When there’s a leak, you want to rush to fill it,” she accepts. “So that was perfectly understandable. But, I think as an industry, we’re not really serving the market at the end of the day by just slapping a Band-Aid on what is becoming really a broader issue.
“I don’t think that we’ll see the emergence of a new single standard that becomes the de facto, if you will. I think this has been a lesson that has some frailties. So what we see is more of a means to having a system of layers of identity that can be connected.”
Personalised TV ads
So Hogue, and others like her, believe that, instead, the industry will move to adapt all manner of practices and technologies that put independence, privacy compliance, privacy respect and interoperability at the heart of audience identification.
For Innovid’s part, it offers a household-level ID built on its ad-serving platform, recording viewing behavior of individual services at the device level and then clustering them into that household identifier.
It’s the sort of practice Hogue thinks will ultimately enable personalized advertising, and has already allowed marketers to be more responsive during the pandemic, on a location-by-location basis.
“Think of automotive dealers who had certain lots open in some DMAs (designated market areas) and perhaps not in others, or grocery retailers that maybe had kerbside delivery in certain markets but online delivery in others,” Hogue explains.
“The need to have that relevant message can be achieved through things like geographic location, small amounts of data that can allow that personalization to take place.
“The evidence shows that it works. When we look at campaigns that have those kind of KPIs and that relevance built in, oftentimes we’ll see upwards of 40% engagement, whether that’s measured through click-through activity, more time spent, completion, all those different variables.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Blockgraph is a JV of Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach that uses the technology behind Bitcoin to enable privacy-compliant sharing of digital ad transaction and effectiveness data between partners.
Now it is broadening its partner base from broadcasters to the back-end.
Identity partners
In this video interview with TransUnion’s media EVP Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Blockgraph CEO Jason Manningham explains.
“It started with distribution – we focused a lot of our efforts, initially focusing on some of the largest distributors in the US,” Manningham says.
“What we see next is working with both demand partners, and bringing them into the equation.
“But, in order to do that, the base of the network will be working with some of the biggest identity enablers in the industry who have the right signals and have the rights to use those signals at scale.
Blockgraph Touts Data Control To Major Players, New CRO Schleider Says
Chain gang
For several years now, tech vendors have searched for an application for blockchain technology in ad-tech.
It works by using a shared, “immutable” – or, untamperable – ledger of actions like ad transactions.
Digital advertising, of course, is an industry that suffers greatly from lack of supply chain transparency, where intermediary vendors stand accused of obfuscating effectiveness and pocketing “ad tax”.
For Manningham, use of Blockgraph could be widespread. He continues: “Then likewise, other kinds of applications, whether it’s modelling, or being able to push segments to all of the programmatic platforms.
“So, we really see this as an ecosystem where we’re bringing together all of the right constituents for whether it’s for addressable TV, data-driven linear, or cross-channel video, which would also include OTT/CTV.
“So for us, it started with core addressable TV, and now we’re increasingly focusing on cross-platform, and working with some of the biggest identity and data partners in the world to make this a reality at scale.”
Comcast’s Blockgraph Sets Up As A JV With Charter, ViacomCBS
Kicking off
Blockgraph was launched in 2017. It uses peer-to-peer technology to let marketers, publishers and distributors match audience segments without sharing consumers’ identifiable information and without any technology intermediaries.
Blockgraph, which already included Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as partners, recently reconstituted as a joint venture, in which the three groups will take equal ownership. Jason Manningham, who was GM of the project, became CEO.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal also began integrating Blockgraph into AdSmart, the pioneering addressable TV platform it got when Comcast acquired Sky.
Video chain
Manningham, tells Spiegel the tech has application in digital video.
“The landscape is just inherently more complex when it comes to video,” he says. “You have distribution channels, and those are increasingly more fragmented.
“And those are not always the same party as the inventory publisher, as the brand advertiser or the data provider.
“So all of these companies need to work together, but they need to do it in a controlled, compliant fashion.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is the view of one agency executive who sees the key theme of 2021 being all about filling the identity gap.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Starcom SVP Director, Solutions Architect, Willie Jackson explains what is changing.
First-party top priority
Mainstay audience tracking methods like third-party cookie matching and mobile device identifiers are diminishing in utility as tech companies, pushed by GDPR and CCPA either deprecate them or switch them to explicit opt-in.
That is pushing marketing toward gaining real, opted-in relationships with audiences or, at least, their data.
#ICYMI Great perspective from @StarcomUSA 's Willie Jackson on why a solid data foundation with the consumer at the center is as important as ever this holiday shopping season. Watch the on-demand replay here. https://t.co/MMrt7KpoJi
— Starcom Worldwide (@StarcomWW) November 12, 2020
“As we head into 2021, the key challenges, the key opportunities, for marketers and publishers is that we want to solidify and shore up our first-party data foundations,” Jackson says.
“Data preparedness is going to be at the forefront of the initiatives that a lot of marketers and publishers are navigating in the next year and change.
“What you’re going to see in the marketplace with the publisher and advertiser ecosystem is a deep interrogation of ways in which to translate that first party data into an addressable identifier in the open marketplace.”
Graphing identity
Across the entire industry, “identity” has become the hot new buzzword, as players look to fill in for the withering of cookies and device identifiers.
Some in the industry are not so sad about their demise, saying those old methods only ever identified devices, not people, and that they still present challenges in how to join up device identifiers into single user profiles.
“I think there’ll be deterministic device graphs that still exist and will continue to thrive as they are rooted in a strong first party data foundation and backbone,” Jackson says.
“But you’ll also see a lot of direct engagements with publishers and supply-side partners.”
Safe havens
Jackson thinks a hot new area will be in both publishers and their brands bringing their own respective audience data to the table – that table ad targeting systems.
However, that is going to require technology that ensures neither partner’s side can see audience data it should not, to adhere to privacy norms.
“(That includes) being able to go directly to your publisher partners that you’ve worked with in the past, working in a way to create a safe haven or intermediate ecosystem through which you can do matching with your first-party data against their first-party data,” Jackson says.
“That would then create your addressable list, your list of IDs against which you’ll buy in the marketplace.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The music and podcast service clocked 185 million monthly active users supported by advertising in Q3 2020 – 31% up on the prior year – as it made €185 million from advertising, equating to a dollar in advertising revenue per user.
The secret sauce? Not just the user scale with which to deliver ads en masse, but also the user data to be able to target specific ads at the right listener.
Multi-platform listening
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Spotify’s global head of audience and data solutions Sean Kegelman describes how the music app listens to user’s signals.
“Identity graph is a really important concept for Spotify because we’re one of a very small handful of platforms that really engage with the consumer across an increasingly large variety of devices,” he says.
“(Consumption) increasingly is done through a variety of different connected devices, connected TVs, connected speakers, gaming consoles.
“(We have an) ability to understand the consumer across a really large variety of devices, and across different contexts, and as they use us in different times of day – you know, in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, etcetera.
“(We know) whether you’re using a gaming console in the morning, a mobile phone in the afternoon, or a connected TV in the evening … we know who you are. That experience of everything that we built up in terms of your taste profile stays with you.”
Self-serve ads
Spotify offers brands the ability to be part of users’ “soundtrack”. The company has long offered the dual revenue channels of premium subscriptions and ad support, now about evenly split in its revenue make-up.
It boasts that its Ad Studio platform helps advertisers create their first ad in just 10 minutes, with targeting and a free voiceover artist tool, video advertising and measurement.
“It really was incumbent upon us to have this kind of approach of, you can access Spotify wherever and however you want to, and we’re going to try to make that as accessible as possible,” Kegelman adds.
Listen and learn
Last month, Spotify reported content consumption had returned to pre-COVID levels after a pandemic listening lull, with in-car listening hours back up and home-based listening above pre-COVID levels, too.
Kegelman thinks measuring is important – not only for Spotify but for its advertiers.
“We’re continuing a march towards increasing quantification and increasing expectations of that quantification also being tied to performance,” he says.
“There’s going to be increasing need to just integrate those things across all the different objectives that an advertiser has – whether that’s the full funnel of objectives, from awareness to acquisition, to growth and retention, those are continuing to, need to be the walls across those things that are being brought down.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Amongst the leading contenders are “identity graphs”, software-driven collections of data that aggregate a number of signals about users into an inferred profile.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kemal Bokhari, General Manager, Data and Analytics, DISH Media Sales, says they will be the key that unlocks the advertising future.
Graphing the future
“Identity is the most important part of addressable,” Bokhari says. “Identity is going to be key as cookies die off.
“Addressable always sends relevant ads to the consumer. The consumer, right now, is overloaded with a lot of advertising that is not relevant to them.
“We have a strong belief that relevant ads are more productive and more useful to the consumer because they get to see ads for products that they’re interested in.
“And identity graphs will make that even more one-to-one targeting to get them the relevant ads instead of the irrelevant ads.
Partner support
DISH, of course, already has sight of its own viewers’ identity, by virtue of being the keeper of subscription relationships.
But it has also called on partners to layer on additional data.
“With our first-party data, we are in a unique position that we have that relationship directly with our subscribers,” Bokhari says.
“And we work with TransUnion to set up a crosswalk with another media agency where they’re able to connect, in a privacy-friendly way, to our subscriber information.
“They can then push to us audience segments that they want to run on DISH and Sling platforms.”
Accelerate change
The benefits? Cost and speed, Bokhari says.
“In the past this media agency would have to send the information to safe haven,” he says.
“And then, the safe haven would then have to push the audience to us.
There would be somebody in between, and there would be costs at each step of the way.
“By doing this direct relationship, we’re able to eliminate that extra step.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is the challenge facing many publishers and advertisers, as Google’s 2022 deprecation of third-party tracking cookies looms.
Safari and Firefox have already blocked the practice, which enables cross-domain tracking, whilst Apple has also rolled out a slew of other changes to restrict ad-tracking.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ehud Furman, VP of Audience Extension and Data at publishers’ content recommendation and advertising platform Tablooa explains how the hole left by third-party cookies may get filled.
Big impact
“We’re not sure what that’s going to be, but it’s not simply removing that capability away completely, but rather trying to find an alternative solution for it,” he says.
Furman explains that Google is being more cooperative with industry partners.
The absence of third-party cookies will have a big impact, at least for Chrome-reliant companies.
“It takes away the ability to track users across domains and that’s the main challenge,” Furman says.
Measurement muddle
That’s a problem because it limits companies’ ability to measure the performance of ads.
“(Measurement is) one of the main challenges with the deprecation of third-party cookies, that the industry will need to handle and so do we,” Furman says. “We rely on third-party cookies.
“There are other ways to measure attribution. There’s also a way to do it from server to server. But, at the end of the day, this is actually probably at the core of what the industry will need to replace.
“There’ll need to be a new mechanism to enable that. Google actually said that they’re going to help creating that mechanism, to make sure that attribution is still possible.”
Graph-building
Taboola is also working around the problem, including by padding out its own data on users, derived from publishers, with more data from external sources.
“We have our own identity graph,” Furman adds. “We work with partners like TransUnion on receiving datasets – data that they have that they can share with us, that it’s legal and okay for us to acquire. We acquire that data. We acquire that data from various partners. We use that data. We basically add it to our graph.
“Taboola is a non-PII company. We’re not collecting personal identifiable data about users, but we are basically matching a signal to a user and to that signal, we’re trying that signal to be deterministic, meaning a signal that has a long persistency, it can stay.
“We’re adding profiles to that signals, so that will increase the probability of at the end of the day, serving the most relevant ad to the most relevant users.”
First-party’s first base
One major source of new data that is rising in place of cross-domain cookies is, simply, gaining opted-in consent from users through authentication, login.
Many publisher sites are working hard to drive up the number of users supplying email addresses, augmented by a range of other fields.
They are the companies Taboola serves, too, by placing native ads at the bottom of news stories.
“Publishers are now going to a lot of effort to build their own (identity) graphs … to maximise their knowledge about the users that they have,” Furman says.
“Publishers, most of them, the innovative ones and the big ones, acknowledge that they need to start, and that they need to collect the data and try to maximise whatever assets that they have.
“Your own data is probably one of the most valuable assets that you can have.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is how Samantha Jacobson, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Oracle, sees the twin compulsion in ad targeting.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jacobson describes how Oracle, whose Oracle Cloud has become a big player in digital marketing solutions, sees the landscape.
Consent-first
Jacobson says: “Consent needs to be on the forefront of every interaction. We want to be as transparent as possible, we want to make sure that consumers are benefiting from however they are engaging, whether it’s in television or in digital.
“And as a result, we believe that a lot of the data that has been available to date will dissipate as there are higher and more transparent barriers put in place to participate.”
Third-party tracking cookies are being deprecated, while Apple is switching its IDFA mobile identifier to opt-in, alongside GDPR and CCPA privacy legislation.
In other words, traditional identifiers are drying up, leaving advertisers looking for alternative, legal ways to identify their audiences.
Marrying signals
“We’ve really focused in on a key number of partners that have both the right data signal and consent in a way that we see as compliant,” Jacobson says, describing how vendors like TransUnion help out.
“(They) are able to marry the two together, the right level of signal, in addition to making sure that it is transparent and compliant with how we want to interface with consumers,” she says.
Oracle says that all its partners must be clear in how they are collecting user data in a consented manner.
“Ultimately, the focus is on the value we’re delivering to consumers and making sure that they have choice and transparency around how to improve their user experience,” Jacobson adds.
It could be brought in through first-party data, it can be through third-party data assets, to which we have access, it could be keyed off of emails, it can be connecting device IDs like cookies and mobile ad IDs.
But just as importantly, we think it’s important to plug in across all ecosystems, which would include Connected TV, OTT ecosystems, in addition to digital and some of the more traditional mediums.
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>At home, according to Simpli.fi co-founder Paul Harrison.
The deprecation of those cookies plus new use privacy controls introduced to iOS are making targetability more difficult.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Harrison surveys the landscape for solutions.
Identity in focus
The new black is “identity graphs”, software that knits together user profile signals from a range of sources, sing IP addresses and other breadcrumb.
They have become a key tool in the quest to identify users and amid the declining value of existing identifiers.
“Really what we’re trying to do is just put more and more identifiers in there that we can find,” Harrison says.
“It becomes much more probabilistic as some of these identifiers become scarce, or they have limited life cycles, but you still get a pretty good picture.”
Strength in household
Harrison says it is important to identify targets at the household level.
He says: “In some instances, what (advertisers) do is they pass us data … whether it be CRM data, whether it be addresses, whether it be general areas that they want to target … that we then match up to identify potential households for targeting purposes. That’s how you use that first-party data.
“You can then enrich the information that you’re giving to the client to get a better picture of what other opportunities you have for targeting that household.
“I think in the future, we’re going to see … more and more of that first party data coming across, sort of in the bid stream for us to be able to target against.”
Back to browser?
But, whilst identity graphs are shaping up to be a key differentiator, Simpli.fi’s Harrison is already looking at what comes next.
He says discussion is bubbling up about the prospect of baking in next-generation identity tools at the browser level.
“I think what’s going to end up happening is that the next phase of this, as we’re hearing in forum discussions in the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium), is you’re going to see potentially some of this trying to be solved at the browser level,” Harrison says.
“There are many different proposals out there on how that would go about happening. I think some of them have a little more validity than others.
“Overall, I’d like to just see some sort of identifiers, maybe with limited life cycles out there, instead of trying to solve things in a very complex way through a browser.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“As an OTT company, we have been working to solve the unique difficulties of identity in that environment for the past five years,” said Mark Rotblat, chief revenue officer of Tubi, the ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox Corp., in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s connected television, and OTT is cookieless.”
Tubi has seen significant growth this year as the coronavirus pandemic has led people to spend more time at home, binge-watching video content. Because Tubi carries advertising, it’s free to consumers who may be maxing their monthly media budgets on subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, Disney+ and other bundles of programming. Tubi now streams about 200 million hours of content a month, up from about 160 million hours in its pre-pandemic days.
Source: Nielsen Streaming Meter data, July 2020
“With the pandemic, everything grew in terms of media consumption,” Rotblat said. “People were looking for more content, and they didn’t necessarily want to pay for more content. Tubi was an ideal place for viewers to go.”
Tubi was among the ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) that major media companies started snapping this year as their viewership grew. Fox bought Tubi for $440 million, while Viacom acquired Pluto TV for $340 million and Comcast took over Xumo for an undisclosed sum. AVOD services make up about a fifth of the viewing time for streaming video services, researcher Nielsen said in a report published in August.
Gathering First-Party Data
A key part of Tubi’s strategy is to collect consumer data through its registration process, which asks for basic information that helps to track viewing habits every time a customer logs into its apps. It also relies on various technical identifiers for viewing devices.
“Really getting into first-party data and registration is very critical,” Rotblat said, adding that the company works to get more granular details about individuals within a household. “We started working with Transunion a little over a year ago to help enrich our own first-party data.”
By combining various sources of consumer data, Tubi can create a more complete profile of its audiences members.
“We have a very good view into how our viewers consume content, what types of content they watch at different points in the day, how different devices tie together within a home,” he said. “There is a lot of interest and focus on advanced measurement attribution, and I expect that to continue for quite some time.”
Collecting first-party data not only helps Tubi’s advertisers to target audiences, but it also helps the company to improve the user experience. Its platform has more than 23,000 titles, but doesn’t want to overwhelm people or make them search through hundreds of titles every time they log in.
“When you have that large of a library, the problem is: how do you get the right content in front of the viewers?” Rotblat said. “How do you have such a large library, but it doesn’t ‘feel’ that way? It feels like, ‘oh, this is exactly what I wanted to watch.'”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
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