But the emergence of multi-device user modalities had already posed a challenge to that method, and to brands that wanted to gain a holistic understanding of consumers’ cross-platform identity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Greg Carr, who works on advertising data partnerships for IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence engine, explains why putting the nail in cookies’ coffin is just fine by him.
“No-one’s ever been in love with some of the solutions we have, but they were kind of necessary,” Carr says.
“As someone who’s kind of bought and sold a lot of audiences, and (is) painfully aware of some of the challenges and pitfalls in that category, I’m really excited about what we’re doing (in the industry).
“We’re getting better understanding in the consumer world of how all this stuff works. We’re cleaning up the stack, the supply chain. We’re removing redundancy. We’re getting better personalization without being creepy. Removing cookies … I think it’s really good for the industry.”
In place of cookies are technologies like identity graphs, which multiple vendors are building by taking privacy-compliant data from a range of sources.
Also, more marketers are looking at building more direct and opted-in relationships with consumers, complying with legislation like GDPA and CCPA.
But Carr cautions against thinking that a user-supplied email address is going to become the single cookie replacement.
“I think it’s a little more complicated than that and we’re going to see a possible outcome as less personalization and more contextual in ways that we haven’t considered it before, things like weather and other signals like that, that are more responsive as opposed to user based,” he says.
Carr’s Watson began life as a question-and-answer technology. These days, it is also a cloud-hosted computing platform that provides a range of cognitive services.
After acquiring The Weather Company, Watson also now makes local weather conditions available to ad companies as buyable attributes.
“We pass weather by zip to LiveRamp,” Carr says. “They group it into IdentityLink-based segments and push those into the DSP (demand-side ad platform) space.
“We have a Watson machine learning modelling capability within LiveRamp’s IdentityLink space that we sort of co-sell with LiveRamp.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Cadreon uses LiveRamp as a data source, and clients are using this data in a number of different ways. Many are using it to re-engage lapsed consumers or to increase the frequency of purchase from existing consumers. Others are utilizing data to build a lookalike model in order to extend the reach of an audience and find more that look like the best consumers and also sometimes to suppress consumers so that messages can be more controlled to them.
“I think that the most important aspect of addressable is that we have the ability to control frequency,” Hall says. “That’s critical, because as consumers, we want a good experience, and as a brand, we want to ensure that those consumers feel positively about our messaging and our brand. Therefore, controlling for frequency, especially across multiple channels, is critical.”
Hall believes that there needs to be some consumer education around value exchange. It’s up to the industry to inform them that in exchange for relevant advertising, they need to know more about why companies collect data and how they protect it.
“I believe that a full-fledged education is key,” Hall says. “Especially today as legislation like CCPA arrives and consumers read that legislation without truly being aware of that value exchange and what they’re getting as the exchange for their data.”
As far as this legislation, Hall is excited that the industry is in a position where they’re offering consumers transparency and can protect their data. It doesn’t come without its anxieties though. First, there’s a lack of understanding from the legislators and voting base on what the industry actually does with data and why they do it. Secondly, multiple states legislating on privacy is not tenable for companies to be able to comply with.
“We can’t expect that a company can operate efficiently and effectively to comply with fifty different policies,” Hall says. “My belief is that we strongly need a single voice and one policy that governs privacy across the United States.”
Hall feels confident, however, in the accuracy of Cadreon’s data sets. They gather it from Axium, so it is ethically sourced, privacy-compliant, and they can ensure that they’re messaging the intended audience.
“We’re in a good position from that standpoint,” Hall says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>“For some perspective, cookies were invented a long time ago for a different purpose. Advertising has piggybacked on top of that vehicle,” Metzer told Beet.TV’s Jon Watts in an interview at LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit. “Now that cookies are starting to disappear, and reliability is going away, different methodologies can be applied.”
Those methodologies largely rely on first-party data. “Understanding that engagement point with your consumer really creates a bridge into people-based marketing,” he says. From there, advertisers can build a model audience and target them.
At least in the short term, this methodology benefits large scale media outlets because they have the biggest pool of logged-in users from which they can collect first-party data. That should change within a year as the marketplace normalizes around the currency of addressable first-party data. Without the strategy of mixing first and third-party data, all companies will have to find new ways to model audiences off of first-party data alone.
During that transition period, fragmentation may present an issue, which Metzer says can only be confronted with try-and-repeat methods. But new methodologies won’t break the industry.
“It won’t shake up and break everything. Other models are being created,” he says. While there are more restrictions, there are also more dimensions to the strategy, namely more devices, formats, engagement and attention. “When you balance it all together we’re in a better spot.”
The most important next step is to understand the consumer and engage with them in a consented environment. But consent isn’t binary.
“What you want is high-quality consent, where the consumers understand why you need their data and what you’re doing with it,” says Metzer.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>But should you throw the baby out with the bath water?
No, according to iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller.
“Measurement is not broken per se,” he says. “There’s no reason to reinvent current age, and gender type of measurement.
“But there is a need for new measurement approach. There is a need to evolve the measurement and to modernise the measurement. Make it faster, more granular, connectable with audience segments, connectable with outcomes.”
iSpot.TV, which offers measurement, attribution and technical services, takes viewing data from Inscape, the subsidiary of TV maker Vizio that uses automated content recognition (ACR) to capture audiences’ real viewing behavior.
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>But the explosion in new measurement techniques and providers is actually causing a headache for ad buyers who want an apples-to-apples analysis of their ad effectiveness.
No wonder so many are actually now calling for fewer, more reliable ways of measuring that smoothe out discrepancies.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Aleck Schleider, SVP of client and data strategy at ad-tech firm Amobee, says advanced TV measurement has been spurred on by Vizio’s smart TV ad unit Inscape making its automatic content recognition (ACR) data widely available to vendors.
“The ability to measure TV … has become a lot easier,” Schleider says. “That allows for companies to do to some pretty seamless marketing measurement.”
But that isn’t all good news.
“The fact is, there’s so much data, there’s so much fragmentation, that it just kind of creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace,” he adds. “Ideally there’s going to be some level of reset … it does require some truth-level data.
“There has to be commonality. We’ve got to pick these pieces off the floor of all this fragmented components, bring them together, put it together to have a common measurement.
“Brands don’t want to have to work with different broadcasters in their own measurement solutions.”
In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.
4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.
Schleider thinks the likes of Nielsen will be leaned on to boost ACR measurement with techniques like panels, plus its own ACR sources, to improve accuracy.
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Contextual targeting is the practice of aligning an ad with content, not with the individual audience member consuming that content.
In truth, the outcome doesn’t have to be an “either-or”. Context and audience targeting can co-exist.
The trouble with that?
“One of the problems that people experience when they try and do that really quickly is limitation of scale,” says Daniel Oakins, VP of product and strategy at ZEFR.
“A few years ago, there was only the technology to target contexts or audiences, but the technology in order to do it together, and open up scale.
“Now we’re starting to see small tools that allow buyers to be able to hit the right audience, and hit the right scale and hit the right context.”
So, how can the context of content get targeted in an era when ad buyers still want to use digital tools to do so?
ZEFR developed technology that analyzes video content more deeply than surface-level metadata allows, to get more detailed criteria that can inform a targeting decision.
The system uses machine learning plus human review to analyze and meta data to millions of videos. This year, Zefr launched its own Context DMP.
Oakins acknowledges contextual indicators like IAB’s categories were already available to buying platforms. But, he says, they don’t go far enough, because different buyers have different goals.
“One pharma chem client might see a piece of video on YouTube as a ‘health and wellness’ piece of content,” he says. “Another pharma client might see that as not appropriate for that brand, just because maybe it’s more about ‘holistic health care’.
“Everything is truly in the eye of the beholder. If I’m trying to create a client’s classification, I need their opinions.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>At the foundation of the response to a cookie-less future, consent and PII data are going to be important.
“You see some of the acquisitions happening where publishers are acquiring the programmatic platforms, the ad tech platforms, so they can have the full stack, and they can manage the people and the consent that they get on there,” Baudino says.
This will be important because these publishers are going to need to own it and know what regulations are coming next. Being proactive in this sense will make things like fragmentation within the industry less of a pressing issue. Being reactive to it, however, will make fragmentation harder to handle.
“You have to have that awareness and a plan for each market and what they’re going to do and be able to operate at data levels that fit each of those markets.” Baudino said. “As long as you have privacy as your foundation and how you build your data and your products and your capabilities, then you should be prepared to handle all situations.”
As far as growth opportunities for the next few years, Baudino believes that connecting digital data in the core marketing and connecting those two worlds together, using anonymous and known data, and connecting the insights that can be learned on both of those can help companies to more effectively market. Lastly, being able to do all of this globally will be a huge advantage.
“In the global markets, they’re going to accelerate their desire to be people-based, and you have to help educate them and understand what’s the investment and be able to give them a good, better, best approach, and consult.” Baudino said. “That’s what we’re finding—there’s a lot of consulting education still happening in the market, and if you’re willing to put in that effort, then you’re going to really support those brands and those platforms that want to listen.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>There are a number of different data sources available now to help shape consumer intent. For eBay, consumer intent is pretty much built in. When someone comes to their site to buy something, it’s an act of intent.
“For us, we feel like we know who they are,” Kelliher says. “They’ve given us the right to work with them and to start teaching our advertising partners how people actually transact.”
While this data may be an inherent part of how eBay operates, Kelliher believes that no company will be able to survive going forward without a first-party data strategy. Companies need to understand what consumers are trying to get from their company in order to effectively advertise to them.
In the near future, Kelliher notices a trend of the walled gardens being built back up again, but he does not fear the prospect of an entirely walled ecosystem. He is wary, however, of a much more fragmented industry on the way.
“Understanding how the pieces come together and the ways that they work together are crucial for an advertiser.” Kelliher says.
He does not believe, however, that standardization is the solution.
“I think that there are layers of technologies that can sit in between and help get from point A to point B,” Kelliher says. “So we know at an absolutely granular level how many brands you consider when making a purchase, how many items you consider when making a purchase, what colors of items you’re looking at when making a purchase. There’s technology platforms that exist that can add that information to other types of behaviors, and that’s where one plus one can truly equal three for an advertiser.”
In the next few years, Kelliher expects to see increased consolidation, and those with unique first-party data will be successful. They’ll find ways to partner with agencies and clients in order to understand how consumers behave in a holistic environment.
“Those that are open to those conversations, and really the ones about, ‘let’s figure this out, I don’t need to make this actionable tomorrow, I need to figure out what this is going to be like a couple of years from now’ are the ones who are going to truly succeed.” Kelliher says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Often, ad buyers decide they want to swap out elements of an ad when they can see a consumer close to the point of purchase.
But that is changing, says one executive whose company facilitates the capability.
“When brands started using personalization, it was primarily lower funnel activities. … conversion-oriented – (for example), somebody saw a product, (so) show them the same product and most likely they will convert,” says Diaz Nesamoney of Jivox, whose technology enables omni-channel multi-version personalization for ad creative.
“But increasingly I think brands have shifted their thinking to saying it’s not just about converting a consumer, but it’s also about making them engage with the brand in a relevant way.
“People buy an SUV for different reasons. We’ve seen great lift, even when you’re just doing brand awareness and significantly more so when you’re trying to convert them.”
Nesamoney says attributes like location, weather and humidity can play a huge part in building a picture of a consumer, in order to understand to whom to target a customized ad..
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Now advanced connected TV platforms are getting in on the “attribution” act.
Plain old linear TV can promise advertisers the same power – but more complex attribution techniques need to emerge over time, says one TV ad sales leader.
“At A+E, we are trying to move from a world where the only data that matters is Nielsen age and gender demos,” says Ethan Heftman, Senior Vice President, Precision & Performance Advertising Sales at A+E Networks, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’re trying to move into a world where outcomes, actions, those are the things that matter for our business. It’s a conversation that linear television can have a major impact in. At A+E, we will guarantee two very specific results (from advertising):
Heftman has previously observed that many in the industry are already staring to price guaranteed ads on a CPW, or Cost Per Whatever, basis.
A+E Networks, which operates channels A+E, History Channel and Lifetime, is accomplishing attribution by partnering with an array of technology and data providers, like LiveRamp, whose RampUp event Heftman was speaking from.
Ultimately, Heftman wants to guarantee advertisers more outcomes than just physical or web traffic – but therein lays more complexity.
“Where you begin to get into more difficult scenarios is where there are more steps in the sales process, in the funnel,” he says. “It just becomes a lot harder.
“There are a lot more steps in the chain between an ad exposure and a sale, steps that we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page and we’re all partnered for the same thing.
“There are a range of vendors and suppliers that can all do individual discrete things. Piecing those vendors together and paying them each individually is a challenge for our business.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>But Amy Yeung thinks that proliferation may be bad.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Amy Yeung, the general counsel and chief privacy officer of Lotame, an audience data company, says she wants to see more collaboration.
“I’m hoping that, as well as many other leaders in the mar-tech ecosystem, can come to some sort of transparent and open framework,” Yeung says. “I think that’s one of the considerations that has otherwise been missing from some of the dialogue that’s been happening right now.”
In place of cookies are technologies like identity graphs, which multiple vendors are building by taking privacy-compliant data from a range of sources.
Also, more marketers are looking at building more direct and opted-in relationships with consumers, complying with legislation like GDPA and CCPA.
But Yeung says: “The industry is so interdependent and interrelated. To be able to get the big data insights, it really requires more ecosystem involvement. That data alone in little bits and pieces really isn’t valuable to anybody, really doesn’t send the right signal or the right opportunities for companies to really tailor their products to the consumers.
“The insights really are a collective concept – there isn’t a true technology today or a true standard that provides transparency across all companies.”
Yeung also says she sees ad agencies as “frozen” when it comes to responding to changes like the end of cookies and the emergence of privacy regulation.
“That’s why there needs to be more dialogue and some industry consensus building on what we can do overall to preserve the large body of data that we have,” she says.
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>In October, MediaMath launched a new initiative, Source, that makes several promises all at once, including:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, MediaMath’s global head of ecosystem Jeremy Steinberg says Source was an attempt to make real the industry’s ideal response to “transparency” concerns. “Instead of spending a lot of time talking about it, we planted a flag,” he says.
“We’re building it, we’ve built the first version of it that we have brands live and running right now, and seeing great outcomes. And now we’re going to keep iterating over time, because we want the whole industry to adopt this new framework, and this new approach to advertising.”
Source partners include Rubicon, Telaria, LiveRamp, Okami, Oracle and publishers directly.
Steinberg says Source covers two core areas:
“When a brand places a dollar with us, they see all the way through the supply chain, exactly how much everything costs,” he says.
“We’re also building new infrastructure to support the buying of accountable advertising with Rubicon. And we’ll do it with Telaria and we’re in talks with other SSPs about doing this.”
“There’s a lot of frustration right now from consumers, because they feel as if they don’t have the trust, and a lot of these companies are taking advantage of compliance, as opposed to really driving forward consumers to control their own data,” Steinberg says.
“We’ve partnered with LiveRamp, and the goal is to expand that relationship and then to pull in other partners who have great identity-based, privacy friendly, consent driven solutions that our infrastructure will enable the best resolution for brands to consumers, in a privacy-friendly way.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Part of this has to do with the TV industry being accustomed to almost 50 years of thinking in terms of age and gender and an infrastructure that supports that.
“We’re about to throw that out and move into a whole different world,” Nail says. “And it just takes time to, first of all, get the infrastructure built up, then to gain the experience with the processes within that infrastructure, and then build up again those benchmarks and that history.”
According to Nail, the TV industry is entering a world in which there will be multiple metrics for different advertisers, sometimes even for the same advertiser with different objectives. This makes it even more complicated for media sellers. There are also risks involved.
“That is my biggest fear,” Nail says. “That TV will end up going down the direct response rathole that digital did in 2000-2001 and has never gotten itself out of. If we do allow TV to go there, we will be doing the brands and ourselves a huge disservice.”
But can the industry balance funnel metrics and brand or revenue business outcome? Nail believes that the industry needs to head towards this balance, and TV as a medium is unique in that there could be payoff in the long-term.
One of the positives is that the finance around advertising will become much clearer, so we could see more companies willing to spend more in order to see more specific outcomes for their brand.
“Now we’re getting better and better tools for tracking,” Nail says. ‘’Whether it’s the cash register, store traffic, web traffic, whatever that business outcome is, we’re getting better tools to measure that which I think will justify the spending on television and video.”
When it comes to the transition away from the cookie, Nail sees a period of chaos as inevitable. He believes that the focus has shied away from the big picture—consumers’ attitudes towards advertising and the invasiveness that is sometimes perceived to come with it.
“There’s a deeper issue of how we do this in a way that consumers feel respected,” Nail says. “And feel like it’s being done more for their benefit than for the advertising ecosystem’s benefit.”
A big part of it is making the value exchange much more explicit, as it has been historically implicit. In being more explicit, Nail sees opportunity for experimentation, especially in giving the user more options to either pay or see ads along with viewing content.
“I have no question that we will get to a good solution in the end,” Nail says. “But it’s never a straight line, it’s always a little bit chaotic for a while, a lot of stuff gets thrown against the wall, but then ultimately we get to a point where we find a really positive solution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Greenspan believes that the platform has done a great job on the safety side of things, but sees more opportunity to be filled on the suitability side.
“What we see is that every single brand has their own definitions when it comes to content—what is acceptable for them or what is not acceptable for them.” Greenspan says. “What we want to do with our context DMP is give that control back to the brands and allow them to say, ‘when I think about health and wellness content or sports content, this is my definition and this is the type of content that I want to be around versus a black box definition that’s broad across the entire industry.”
Where contextual fits into the overall ecosystem varies from platform to platform. For ZEFR, they started within the YouTube ecosystem where there are a lot of shared devices.
“We believe and have always been under the belief that contextual is really the strong signal as to not only who somebody is but the mindset that they’re in versus a traditional passive cookie device or traditional audience segment.” Greenspan says.
This means actively aligning brands’ messages with the consumers who are actively looking for messages within that category. This becomes most accurate when brands take into account full context.
As far as data and measurement, Greenspan has found that using broad keywords to define contextual simply isn’t effective. Instead, they have aimed to have humans take a more active role in the process. They’re now having people review videos and looking for nuance and detail in order to train the machines.
“Our whole focus is taking in the preferences of the brand,” Greenspan says. “Really understanding what type of content meets their criteria, what doesn’t, have humans actually watch a lot of videos, and then ultimately use the machines based on all the data coming from the human review of the videos, and that’s what’s going to drive the best decision-making and the best actual models.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>At the 2020 US presidential election, that is set to go in to overdrive.
And it’s not just web, app and online video publishers who are set to benefit.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, LiveRamp’s chief evangelist for advanced TV Gayatri Bhalla explains how candidates are already gearing up to use advanced TV targeting techniques.
“Advocacy groups and political campaigns are permitted use cases for the voter file,” she says. “So they get every person in the United States over the age of 18, with the permission to be able to use that data.”
Bhalla says that different candidates will end up running very different campaigns because different congressional districts supply different volumes of data.
She says that means the expertise of media buyers has never been more necessary.
And changes in the digital video space are driving further interest in TV targeting.
“The loss of YouTube for targeted inventory has driven a lot of the change in the market this cycle, because … it’s very easy on Google to be able to send in a custom audience and deploy a digital video campaign on YouTube,” Bhalla says.
“When that policy changed, it was announced in November – it took effect in January, on January 7th – it took away a lot of the targeted inventory for video for campaigns. That has increased the adoption we’re seeing for these other more sophisticated platforms for video.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>There’s an influx of solutions appearing around this problem, and most of them are supplementing what was already there with the third-party cookie. Nadeau believes that the more effective approach is to consider what got the industry where it is in the first place.
“What we need to do is think about what got us here, which is really deteriorating consumer trust,” Nadeau said. “Letting technology run and really inform how we market to people as opposed to the other way around, and so I think it’s all about taking a step back and think about where we want to go and how we get there.”
The next step is to explore addressability in a smart and responsible way. This will allow companies to build more trust with consumers. Another next move is to think about the rebirth and regrowth of contextual in order to think about moments rather than just people.
“We got so focused on chasing the right cookie, the right person, the right user, that we forgot to care about what moment they’re in.” Nadeau said. “Are they in the right mindset? Are they actually amenable to that type of advertising and that type of conversation and relationship-building with brands at that moment in time?”
Being more aware of this will help to inform creative and will allow companies to craft a more accurate interaction based on the moment itself.
In the early days of first-party strategies, there has been a lot of variation as to how publishers are utilizing this data. Nadeau doesn’t see there being one single standard approach just yet. With clients, on the other hand, there’s a bit of pause as to how to move forward. Much of their approach is dependent on how relient they are on their first-party data, size and scale, and risk tolerance.
“While we all talk about the surface, the cookie going away, that’s the symptom not the illness.” Nadeau said. “The illness is eroding trust. Those brands that are much more focused on maintaining consumer trust, which hopefully they all are to some extent, are the ones who are really digging in deep.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>The reason for that boils down to three attributes about the data and identity industries.
Just because it’s an ecosystem doesn’t mean there aren’t winners. In media and marketing, that’s Facebook and Google. Kawaja chalks their dominance to two things: their performance, and their contribution to the industries they operate in.
“Facebook has massive network effects,” says Kawaja. “If we can take what has worked really well in isolated circumstances and apply it to the open web, we have a winner.”
Another category where there will be winners and losers is the streaming wars. Kawaja calls what’s happening the result of “hyper competition in a large sector going through fundamental changes driven by the consumer.” Consumer trends are the “litmus test” for what’s meaningfully influencing the industry. For TV, an industry with $1.2 trillion worth of market cap, the shift away from linear cable and toward over-the-top streaming is an existential change with a lot at stake.
“This is a massive industry changing in front of our eyes, with content needing to be delivered in a different way,” he says. “It’s a classic battle, this massive channel is becoming addressable. I expect to see blood and carnage.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>TransUnion aims to develop solutions for the connected consumer in mind. They have a comprehensive and accurate data set around identity, combined with audience solutions to create addressable interactions for partners to have with their consumers. As a credit reporting agency first, Oliveira explained their advantage working in media.
“What we’re bringing to the table for media companies is this idea of identity and audiences that are brought together underneath that TransUnion umbrella,” Oliveira says.
The company works with first-party data to gather an accurate understanding of who the individual is in order to create more precise engagements.
“If you think of the heritage of TransUnion as a credit reporting agency,” Oliveira says. “We can’t use the data from the credit reporting agency, but we can acquire data and validate it against that data set. TransUnion then has a large aggregated set of identifiers and data assets at the PII level, and we can make that available through the appropriate channels for media companies.”
This can mean providing media companies with predictive audiences from a modeling perspective or helping them combine audiences to make available to their ecosystem partners.
As far as addressable, Oliveira believes that TransUnion’s role is to power confident, addressable interactions. The accuracy of their data set is what ensures that partners can reach the consumer in the most specific and engaging ways.
“The reality is if your data is not accurate, you can’t have an addressable conversation that will bear fruit,” Oliveira says. “We think it’s really important that that’s powered by an accurate data set to enable the ecosystem to do all the things that connected consumers are really looking for.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>For LiveRamp, crafting this engagement means taking their marketer’s data and enabling them to use that data across many different channels. In an increasingly fragmented industry, this hasn’t been so easy, but Clinger believes that there are some benefits.
“One of the benefits that we’re going to see with the end of the third-party cookie is we’re going to go from having hundreds of different cookie IDs to having common, people-based IDs that are encrypted and securely moved through the ecosystem so that your have a secure, privacy-safe way to interact with the consumer to drive a meaningful consumer journey and do it much for efficiently,” Clinger says.
This ecosystem includes all of the companies in ad tech that you need to use to drive a campaign. In order to reach somebody with an ad, it doesn’t just happen through one platform.
“All of these have to interoperate,” Clinger says. “And that’s where we come together as the neutral identity provider, connecting them all together on people-based identity and making it easy to move data in a secure and efficient manner across those platforms.”
One of the challenges he identifies is privacy, which he calls an “industry problem”. Publishers, marketers, and ad tech platforms all must take responsibility and work to improve this.
“We need to talk about what the open internet is and how the open internet works,” Clinger says. “The open internet is built on the idea of a value exchange. I as a consumer can go to a website and I can access all of this amazing content for free… and I do that by sharing my identity and data. But we need to be clear to consumers about what’s happening, we need to explain the value exchange that’s happening, we need to make it easy for them to opt out.”
Though privacy may be an issue, Clinger sees the 2020’s as an era of tremendous opportunity. There’s opportunity to build a better ecosystem, to move from cookies to people-based identity, and to regain the trust of the consumer.
“It’s going to be an exciting few years,” Clinger says. “I think we have an opportunity to transform the ecosystem, and I’m really bullish on where the ad tech ecosystem is going.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>That is according to one executive who thinks advertisers need to use more precise measurement than TV’s traditional panels, even though they will be challenged by new regulation.
“Let’s replace the legacy panel,” says Ashwin Navin CEO of ad-tech company Samba TV”, which may have worked in the 1950s, with a much larger panel that’s much more representative of how video is being consumed at large, not from one particular TV manufacturer, or one particular device, but from a diversity of devices, where you can get a much more representative picture of the picture that exists.
“The data that exists outside the television is quite robust. The models that we enjoy in digital media are pretty sophisticated. That rigor needs to be replicated in the television.”
San Francisco-based Samba was set up to help advertisers and broadcasters know, with certainty, which TV shows viewers were watching, for how long and how attentive they were.
Launched in 2008 and backed by investors including Mark Cuban, the outfit works by having software embedded on millions of viewing devices via app makers which bundle Samba’s recommendation features.
Its dataset is collected from now over 20 different television brands globally, from over 25 million opted-in households, including 10 different manufacturers in the US.
“I think our industry is completely flatfooted in the way we approach datasets,” Navin continues. “We put consumers at the end of the consideration, and we need to start putting the consumer at the beginning of any conversation that involves data
“It’s best to just work with first parties. Anything less than that in the absence of a more sort of transparent regulatory framework is putting big businesses at risk.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.
Ad-tech companies were already moving toward alternative options, focused on gaining explicit, opted-in relationships with users.
And the CEO of one, LiveRamp’s Scott Howe, says the industry will be just fine.
“The good news is, cookies were not a good mechanism around which the industry should build – there are better forms,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.”
Howe points to LiveRamp’s own Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), which he says achieves nearly three times the addressable reach of cookies.
Howe thinks that, instead of “hiding that behind the curtain”, advertisers will know have a range of methods to explicitly gain consent from users.
And some of those consent requests will include permission for sharing data with other companies.
Whilst that may seem against the spirit of privacy protection regulation, new regulations are all about empowering users to choose.
“For most companies, the most valuable data they have is their own first-party CRM data,” Howe says. “As a result, it stands to reason that the most valuable data that they don’t have is someone else’s first-party authenticated CRM data.
“So, when you put two of those sets together and allow two companies that are complementary to start to collaborate, amazing things happen.
“A major marketer who wants to share data with, say their merchant partners, or a major publisher that wants to collaborate with a major advertiser.”
In March, LiveRamp introduced Save Haven, described as “enabling secure, permission-enabled data sharing for brands and their partners”.
According to the announcement: “Example use cases of LiveRamp Safe Haven include the ability to connect a brand with a retailer to refine audience segments with transaction data, or connect a publisher with an advertiser to curate audiences and measure outcomes.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Instead, it got preoccupied with technologies which promise hyper-detailed targeting of individual users, regardless of the content they are consuming.
That was until privacy regulation put the brakes on advanced audience targeting techniques.
What’s coming next is what came before. In other words, to find their audiences, ad buyers are turning back toward the old method of “contextual” placement. But, in 2020, context comes with a difference.
“In the privacy era that we’re now in … what’s old is new again,” says Comscore activation GM Rachel Gantz. “Contextual targeting was quite popular from a digital perspective for a long time. It really took a back seat to audience-based approaches.
“We’re now seeing, because of all the privacy focus, the pendulum swing back towards connected TV and towards contextual offers.”
We're excited to introduce @Comscore to our Contextual Video Marketplace. This partnership represents our continued focus on privacy-driven innovation to meet brands' needs for CTV advertising and the next step in expanding contextual targeting to CTV. https://t.co/r4Vv0eBK6I pic.twitter.com/04tMD6Pawy
— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) March 2, 2020
Gantz’s Comscore this week announced that its segments for describing the brand safety and contextual categorisation of content will be available to IRIS.TV.
The latter, an LA company, offers a contextual video marketplace which uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata, helping ad buyers decide which inventory to buy against.
Gantz says that advertisers are growing weary about connected TV because they expect to be able to use the get the brand safety effectiveness to which they have now become accustomed in other digitals channels also in OTT environments.
And she says the looming death of cookie-based targeting will further spur the drive back to contextual.
“I think it’s going to mean that people are focused on much more privacy centric solutions, like contextual,” she says. “I think it means that people are just going to pay a little more attention … to exactly what are the mechanisms they’re using to be able to reach the audiences and content that they’re after.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, LiveRamp agency partnerships GM Daniella Harkins says the news is a blow – but there is silver lining.
“It’s almost earth shattering to our industry,” Harkins says. “(But) with change comes opportunity.”
Specifically, Harkins imagines two positive trends flowing from the news:
The writing was arguably put on the wall for cookies when GDPR was introduced a couple of years ago, placing tighter limits on what marketers and platforms could do with user data.
In Europe, explicit cookie consent directives had already begun to eat away at cookies’ effectiveness.
Subsequently, greater user control over third-party cookies in Safari and Chrome had further reduced the extent to which advertisers can depend on the technique.
It all helps add up to make a world in which marketers will have to benefit more from an opted-in relationship with a consenting user than from cookie-ing them around the web.
But Harkins is relaxed. “Now different partners are starting to think about inserting the individual into a bid stream so that we’re not necessarily losing how we can transact,” she says. “I think that fundamentally is really going to help drive the industry forward.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
It took place at RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco, presented by ZEFR.
For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>“The problem with keyword analysis is that there’s a sparsity of language,” says ZEFR co-CEO Rich Raddon in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“You’ll have a title, you might have some tags, you might have some comments associated with that video. But it’s very, very hard by looking at that … to ascertain what a video is about and to see if it’s suitable for a brand.”
That is why Raddon and his company developed technology that analyzes video content more deeply than surface-level metadata allows, to get more detailed criteria that can inform a targeting decision.
Raddon says that video platforms have done a lot to make their ad buying safer for brands, but he says deeper work is necessary to understand the real context of videos.
“The platforms, historically, have had some brand safety issues, but both of those platforms have made a tremendous effort and investment in making sure that their platforms were brand-safe,” Raddon acknowledges.
“We have focused for the last four years on YouTube specifically, and on video for Facebook,” says Raddon. “Both of those organisations recognise the need for third parties, just to give brands and agencies more flexibility.
This year, Zefr launched its Context DMP. California based Zefr helps marketers effectively target content based on their brands contextual preferences at scale in video.
The interview took place ahead of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco, presented by ZEFR. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
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