New Identity Solutions
Two of our partners continue to innovate strong solutions in this space worth watching. And, some things we’re building. And some notes on Native advertising.
LiveRamp
As discussed in the first paper, there are a number of identity solutions purporting to solve for third-party cookie deprecation, and after further investigation of the subject, I’ve come to the conclusion that LiveRamp’s authentications-focused solution stands out from the rest. Listen, the ‘logged-in’ internet—when you exclude the walled gardens such as Google and Facebook—, is a smaller universe. But, man-o-man, is it stronger than the unauthenticated universe.
We like LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) because it connects authenticated publisher inventory directly with advertiser demand—all while supporting consumer privacy. The solution requires a transparent value exchange, where consumers get better, more valuable content and experiences in exchange for authentication. It’s also technically sound and secure, because it builds on LiveRamp’s 10+ years in the identity space. ATS ensures publishers retain control of their data and no sensitive data leaves the publishers’ hands.
And LiveRamp has stood up an infrastructure that enables marketers to do everything they’re used to: targeting, frequency capping, measurement, etc.—but in a far better way than third-party cookies could. The solution may have less scale when comparing inventory tied to cookies vs. authentications, but the opportunity to move away from a dependence on third-party cookies and towards respecting individuals’ privacy choices is awesome. This little fact is one of the reasons Facebook and Amazon are so strong in their offerings. Maybe we’ll have less scale, but to be able to increase addressable reach and further prove effectiveness like Facebook does, is a good sign for this smaller environment.
SEMCasting
Audience Designer is a product from SEMCasting, Inc. which is a private company out of the Boston region who has been working with IP addresses and location data for over 20 years. Their solution does not focus on cookies, but instead privacy-compliant IP address and IP Address triangulation. Their data sets, data analytics, onboarding tools, and audience analysis tools are tools we use today. This will continue into the future. This also works effectively across devices and provides us the ability to measure reach and frequency by household across channels as well as incremental reach. When dealing with IP addresses it is not as simple as it seems, and we have the utmost confidence in their methodologies and tools since they’ve been doing it for a long time.
Contextual Target on steroids by Pontiac (Sales pitch!)
We have built in a really fabulous tool into our self-service tool Pontiac as well as the ProgMechs offerings. Our tool will target and REPORT on full URLs. This allows us to really understand which ads are working well on which custom URL domains. Simple open-faced contextual product is available through Pontiac, our managed service team, or via PMPs. We customize a 5,000 URL site list of the highest targets and measure and inform via highlights, etc.
A Note about Native Advertising Formats
Native advertising is the broad term used to describe web and app-based ads which blend into organic content. Ultimately, we joke that these ads simply contain images and words. Many native ads and exchanges are already large scaled and tested ecosystems, including Microsoft native, Yahoo Gemini, Triple Lift, Sharethrough, Nativo, Taboola, Outbrain, etc. For many marketers, native takes a backseat to display advertising because there is no pixel tracking on Native ads, and it is not possible to see post-view attribution across many native formats. Native has also taken a backseat because there is no place to show the ‘ad choices’ icon, and therefore, there is limited behavioral advertising available across Native advertising.
But all of this changes without cookies. Also, click-based tracking, something in which native advertising formats excel, is about to have its hey-day. When cookies fall, it sure looks like native could be more desirable than display. But time will tell.
