The announcement was made today. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Late last year we spoke with Lee about publisher uses of “identifiers” in audience targeting. We have re-published that video and story with today’s news.
Our report from November:
Little by little, inventions and partnerships are working to heal a digital advertising world wounded by the erosion of third-party identity tracking.
In the latest, MediaMath’s Source buying DSP is integrating another identity solution, purporting to support the identification of consumers across devices on premium publishers’ sites, without cookies.
The solution is Merkury, the ID graph from Dentsu’s Merkle. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Merkle’s John Lee outlines the opportunity.
A recent Digiday survey found 38% of publishers will not have a solution for identifying audience targets after third-party cookies are turned off.
“Identity has been really third-party conversation in the past – third-party cookies, device IDs, things that could be rented and managed by a few companies that maintain these big identity graphs,” Lee says.
“With cookie deprecation, with increasing consumer privacy regulation depending on which market we’re talking about, the ability to rely on these third-party identifiers is obviously becoming obsolete.
“So the conversation’s needing to shift inherently for the buy and the sell side of the equation, the clients, the brands and the publishers to take ownership of their own identity, which is primarily based on first party data as we go forward.
“We are transitioning towards a world in which brand and publisher ownership of first party identity is going to be the key to maintaining addressability in the ecosystem.”
Merkle has recently been building out its identity chops, off the back of its Merkury, an identity graph platform covering 96% of US adults aged over 18 that includes associated email addresses, device identifiers like cookies and device IDs.
It recently acquired 4Cite Marketing, bringing in a first-party identity engine, allowing Merkury to incorporate first-party data like web and email traffic, helping ad buyers and publishers enable personalisation and targeting.
Lee hails it as “a huge step forward” in a world where traditional third-party identifiers are drying up. More than that, in MediaMath’s Source, ad buyers have more extensive information available about their ad supply chain.
“The marketers can go in and see how all the different pieces connect and where all the handoffs are,” Lee says. “That applies not just to the programmatic bidding pipes, but it applies to the identity pieces as well.
“So with Source, MediaMath welcomes us to say, ‘Hey, bring your Merkury ID into source and we will use it being a cookie-less ID as the currency that we allow advertisers to use to manage reach frequency’.”
Here is the press release on today’s news.
]]>Deprecation of third-party tracking cookies and limits on mobile ad identifiers are forcing more ad buyers to target more smartly.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Sandra Swindle, SVP, CRM Technology Delivery Lead at Merkle, says what they do instead cannot be just a single tactic but, rather, a range.
The new world will be all about person data. But Swindle says brands should not only be focusing on the people data they gather after sale to now-known customers. It starts before those people are even on the horizon.
“(You need) foundational identity linking capability that allows you to recognise somebody before they’re necessarily a first-party record for that particular brand,” Swindle says.
“Before they become a customer, (you must be) recognising that individual. Tying that record back into second-party and third-party data is going to become really important.
“As that starts to deprecate, having a solid base and foundation of known consumers that you’re working against and being able to tie your first party customers back into that known group of consumers as a base, is going to become foundational.”
Apple threw the mobile industry into chaos by announcing plans to deprecate the #IDFA (Identifier For Advertisers) on #iOS. Learn what #marketers need to know in a webinar with us and @branchmetrics on Dec 9:https://t.co/WjsA0039Hd pic.twitter.com/8nX9jUMmO5
— Merkle Inc. (@Merkle) December 7, 2020
In 2020, the new focus for brands is gaining a real, direct relationship with audiences.
If they don’t already have those records, they need to gather them – and that’s going to mean providing attractive value in return for signals like email addresses. Some are coming to call this voluntarily-supplied information “zero-party” data.
“You really want to personalise and make those experiences most relevant for consumers,” Swindle says. “But, in order, to do that brands need that data back.
“And so, giving an exchange of value for that data, is something that a lot of brands are working on right now in order to keep that consumer profile or understand how to make their products work for consumers and drive what consumers are looking for. Tomorrow is going to continue to be relevant as we move into this compliance era.”
Having an identity solution is the one crucial thing that can bring your #data together, deliver an accurate view of your customer, and fuel the vision you seek. Courtney Trudeau shares more:https://t.co/0fRjuQYFaJ pic.twitter.com/wVRzZxIm6R
— Merkle Inc. (@Merkle) December 3, 2020
Not only that, but Swindle says there should be a big focus on connecting up person profiles pulled in from other sources.
So-called second-party data (other companies’ first-party data) and third-party data (that bought from data aggregators) can be combined, Swindle suggests.
“A lot of the different partners are locking those IDs down,” she says. “But try to ensure that you have a broad enough profile in order to connect that back into second parties and third parties.
“It’s going to become important to leverage different exchange groups that have those second party and third party connections, in order to then take advantage of your customer base and drive that asset out further into different media opportunities and into that landscape as third party cookie deprecates.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
]]>But a collection of new developments promises to mean ad land must continue to respond and evolve to the changing privacy landscape.
That is according to an executive from one of Dentsu Aegis Network’s data-driven ad agencies.
“Still, I think you see changes going on,” says AJ Kintner, Merkle M1 VP business development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
He cites similar privacy regulation mooted for California and Vermont as changing the game – but it doesn’t end there.
“What happens if the cookie goes away?,” he asks. “We’re seeing a decrease of cookies in the space, Apple’s making a lot of changes with their policies.
“People are kind of a little bit worried that what we’re currently doing in optimization or targeting might change. So everyone’s kind of asking, ‘How are we going to fix it?’ And there’s not a lot of solutions right now.”
Around the industry, tech vendors are scrambling to offer that solution – combining multiple fragments of an individual’s identity, as laid by different digital devices, uniting them in to a singular whole.
Parly as a hedge against that, Kintner wants to see more direct deals done between publishers and ad buyers.
“(After the changes), IP addresses might be PII (personally-identifiable information),” Kintner says. “If that’s true, that’ll change a lot of how companies in the ecosystem work. I mean, device graphs are currently being built off of IP addresses across the board of many companies. So if that goes away and becomes a private PII, it could change a lot of the ecosystem.
“We hope the privacy (issue) doesn’t come out of nowhere and just stop a lot of what we’re doing in programmatic. That’s the worst case scenario, (that) we have to switch so fast to a cookie or an anonymous ID.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Since gaining, keeping and growing customers involve different phases, being able to discern them leads to knowing what messaging to deliver across platforms. “Linking those two things up we think is the next phase of where the business is going,” Spengler opines in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “It’s data, but then you have to know what to say and it’s creativity.”
Powering much of this progress within Dentsu is the M1 platform developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes, according to Spengler.
“That gives us a tremendous ability to work with our clients to identify true targets based on all the data they would want to know about somebody,” and then to figure out “how to connect them at various end points so we can actually speak to those exact people. So it’s making media more precise and more powerful.”
Part of the process is connecting audiences with media owners. “The conversation we’re having is about audiences, it’s less about GRP’s,” Spengler says. “It’s about content and environment, because content and context will always be important. We’re coming together on that.”
Understanding the differences among audiences goes hand in hand with being able to determine how specific targets are consuming media, according to Spengler.
“You’ve got five different devices. Am I going to waste money and talk to you five different times when I only want to talk to you once? So you’ve got to really understand who you are and what device you’re on so we’re not wasting the money.”
Asked about the value that media agencies need to provide, Spengler says “It’s very complex. It used to be strategy and save me money.” Now its data, technology and creativity working together.
“It’s higher level work but that’s what our clients need and that’s what we’re trying to build ourselves to be able to deliver.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“I think we’re going to ultimately end up negotiating live TV, because those are the moments that have the greatest attention. They’re wrapped around cultural moments that we want to associate brands with,” Ray explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
He bases his “hypothesis” on the nature of non-live programming “Most of that content is very low rated, it’s time shifted in terms of how people are viewing it, and therefore our ability to manage reach, frequency, audience delivery in a programmatic or audience targeted way is absolutely the future.”
Ray will be a featured speaker on June 6 at Beet Retreat in the City. Titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose: The Beet.TV Town Hall, the event will bring together leaders in the advertising and media industry for a full day of conversation and interaction.
Another trend he sees continuing unabated is the desire for marketers to “own the ID” of their customers using personally identifiable information, not data proxies. He cites Amazon as an example, noting that every single user has a registered ID, “you have your address that you’ve given, there’s a credit card number, there’s no way that you can transact without them having some level of personally identifiable information.
“And so I think every single client is trying to move towards owning and identifying to the best that they can their customers.”
Dentsu is one of the youngest of the major agency networks and its initial holding, media agency Carat, was known for its strength in consumer-related analytics when it came to the U.S. from Europe in the late 1990’s and began to acquire media-buying services. Dentsu’s 2016 acquisition of a majority stake in marketing agency Merkle had the effect of “transforming the organization around people,” says Ray. “What Merkle brings is 30 years of dealing with consumer and understanding consumers through that data.”
Combined with Dentsu’s existing data and analytics assets, Merkle has helped to create “an incredibly robust data cloud that allows us to truly understand people. And critically, doing that based on PII data, name address email address. Not a projection of someone or a proxy of someone based on a cookie ID or device ID or panel ID but actually an authenticated deterministic ID.”
A couple of years ago, Dentsu agencies recommended to clients that a small percentage of cable upfront dollars should be put aside for programmatic linear television. “For those clients that did that, they actually learned about what networks were working or weren’t working, and that was leveraged for the next TV Upfronts,” Ray recalls.
“For other clients, they saw such success with that they doubled their investment. Maybe ten percent to twenty percent programmatic. And this year, we’ve got a handful of clients that have almost a third of their cable dollars that are being spent in some form of addressable or audience targeted television. I think that’s going to continue.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>But the reality so far is a little different, a panel of advertising tech execs discussed at a retreat convened by Beet.TV:
Merkle programmatic head Mac Delaney
MediaLink data and technology SVP Matt Spiegel
Coull CEO Irfon Watkins
Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz
“Big-brand marketers are still struggling with getting a lot smarter and more sophisticated with currencies and the metrics available to them,” consulting firm MediaLink’s Spiegel claimed. “We’re still in the early days.”
What’s the hold-up? Spiegel explained: “The technology is there, the ability to look at the data exists. What has not changed is the budgeting process. That’s why attribution has not taken off as many of us thought it would have. It is a process problem at the marketers’ side.”
Ad planning software provider Furious’ Swartz completely agreed. She said marketers are still budgeting on fiscal calendars whilst decisions on ad optimisation at happening at the ad impression level.
She said marketers should heed “kaizen“, the Japanese discipline of “continuous improvement”: “Continually ingesting data an making systems and efficiency greater and greater over time.”
The panel agreed that marketers, amid high degrees of disruption, are clinging to familiar metrics.
“We’re talking about all these transformative things,” said video analytics startup Coull’s Watkins. “But, in the end, it all comes back to knowns – we want safety. We want the revolution – but actually we want a safe one.”
That adds up to what panel moderator Joanna O’Connell has called “the bloodless revolution“, a change which seems profound but which ends up looking a lot like the TV industry in the end.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
]]>At the start, ad agencies tended to concentrate their programmatic specialism in distinct corporate units, run as a service for sibling departments.
But, as the techniques have gained adoption, some have been tempted to make the function available across the group. Case in point: last year, Publicis’ VivaKi unit moved from a centralized offering to threading the discipline throughout sibling agency departments.
So, are we about to see programmatic go large, by disappearing as a separate off-shoot? The man who led VivaKi’s reorganisation advises caution.
Mac Delaney, formerly the programmatic head at Publicis’ SMG and now programmatic head at performance marketing agency Merkle, says: “The assumption is that this is a skillset, like ‘digital’, that can be decentralised quickly. The reality is that no one stack can do it all, you have multiple layers of complexity.”
Delaney says agencies have been “centralising in order to refine the skill set”, and says: “You need to have a concentrated team that can refine best-in-class processes and realise ‘we’ve got to move slowly’. Don’t decentralise all at once.”
According to a two-year-old Digiday write-up of Delaney’s thoughts on decentralisation, the practice is preferable from a client perspective but: “It will be ‘years, not quarters’, before agency teams are able to effectively use programmatic planning and forecasting tools to implement, optimize, analyze and report campaigns without error.”
Delaney says an added challenge comes from the fact that many of the staff required by programmatic technology, decentralised or not, are attracted to top tech firms – and perks.
“That team of experts represents the future employees of Google, Twitter and Facebook,” he says. “When they leave, they’re going to get equity and a bonus they can bank on.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
]]>His group is growing quickly, he says in this Beet.TV interview — and adds that two big client wins will be announced later this month.
We spoke with him about the agency, its roots in search and display, its management of DMP’s for many big companies and the roadmap for its programmatic operations.
We interviewed him during CES at the MediaLink opening night party.
Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2016 is sponsored by Adobe.
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