Dentsu’s John Lee, Global Chief Strategy Officer at its Merkle unit, is joining NBCU in the newly-created role of Chief Data Officer, sitting within the company\u2019s Global Advertising & Partnerships division.<\/p>\n
The announcement was made today<\/a>.\u00a0 The news was first reported<\/a> by the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n Late last year we spoke with Lee about publisher uses of “identifiers” in audience targeting.\u00a0 \u00a0 We have re-published\u00a0 that video and story with today’s news.<\/p>\n Our report from November:<\/strong><\/p>\n Little by little, inventions and partnerships are working to heal a digital advertising world wounded by the erosion of third-party identity tracking.<\/p>\n In the latest, MediaMath’s Source<\/a> buying DSP is integrating another identity solution, purporting to support the identification of consumers across devices on premium publishers’ sites, without cookies.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A recent Digiday survey <\/span>found<\/span><\/a> 38% of publishers will not have a solution for identifying audience targets after third-party cookies are turned off.<\/span><\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\nFrom third to first base<\/h2>\n
Identity crisis<\/h2>\n