2nd-party data Archives - AdMonsters https://www.admonsters.com/category/2nd-party-data/ Ad operations news, conferences, events, community Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:33:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 The Data Warehouse Has Replaced Many DMP Functions, but Is It Enough for Publisher Data Monetization? https://www.admonsters.com/the-data-warehouse-has-replaced-many-dmp-functions-but-is-it-enough-for-publisher-data-monetization/ Thu, 08 Aug 2024 01:28:01 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=659465 As data privacy regulations evolve, publishers are centralizing data within warehouses, but is it enough for data monetization? With DMPs falling short, the future lies in purpose-built applications that enhance activation, streamline audience building, and support complex identity resolution and collaboration. Dive into the challenges and opportunities for sustainable revenue growth in this privacy-centric era.

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As data privacy regulations evolve, publishers are centralizing data within warehouses, but is it enough for data monetization? With DMPs falling short, the future lies in purpose-built applications that enhance activation, streamline audience building, and support complex identity resolution and collaboration. Dive into the challenges and opportunities for sustainable revenue growth in this privacy-centric era.

At this point, it’s not news that years of ongoing changes in data privacy regulation have created massive amounts of change in the way that data is being used (or not used) across the advertising industry.

As IAB Tech Lab CEO, Anthony Katsur, often says, “Just like energy, finance, or healthcare, advertising is now a regulated industry.” As part of this trend, publishers face challenges in creating sustainable revenue growth.

Navigating Data Privacy in Advertising

Whether it’s the continuing decline in ad revenue that digital publishers are grappling with or the never-ending struggle that the streaming television industry is having to reach profitability it’s clear that owners and publishers of media are feeling the effects of these changes.

One of the areas where these changes are most visible is within the publisher’s data technology stacks. Increasingly, publishers are centralizing the many data sources they need for monetization within their data warehouse. While this evolution brings the promise of insights and connectivity, publishers also need a purpose-built application layer to help them activate and get the most value from their data.

DMPs: From Central Role to Obsolescence

For years publishers relied on DMPs to be at the center of their monetization efforts. As cookie-based monetization becomes less and less dependable and publishers’ distribution channels continue to fragment outside of the web these systems have failed to develop new solutions for key functions like app and historical data collection, 2nd-party audience enrichment, and programmatic activation.

This leaves most legacy DMPs relegated to web-based data collection, audience segmentation, and simple ad-serving activation. Additionally, traditional DMPs were not built with important capabilities such as data clean rooms, identity resolution, and PETs which are extremely important in our privacy-centric world.

Data Warehouses: A New Hub for Monetization

Many DMPs have responded by integrating large data sets through mergers and acquisitions to help fill gaps around identity, some are playing catch up by trying to build more privacy-centric features like identity and clean rooms, and others have decided to completely go out of the business. A response to this lack of innovation by DMPs in recent years has been more organizations investing in their data warehouse to centralize their various audience data sources. The question is, is the data warehouse alone enough?

The Missing Piece: Purpose-Built Applications

As we talk to customers in the market it’s clear that they need applications that can work with their data warehouse to create efficiencies and grow their revenue. One of the biggest challenges is actually activating data.

Data warehouses often rely on applications and integration providers to make data more actionable which leaves publishers building expensive custom solutions and navigating complicated operations.

Similarly to how the Composable CDP movement has stepped up to help marketers evolve how they activate data in their warehouse, media owners and publishers (and new companies like retail media) need solutions that are purpose-built for both the era of privacy as well as ad monetization use cases.

Embracing the Future of Audience Monetization

Audience monetization platforms of the future need to be able to combine the streamlined audience building and activation (in both programmatic and direct)  that legacy DMPs relied on, while also allowing for more complex tasks like normalizing various data sources, running complex identity resolution models and collaborating within data clean rooms.

As free and scaled 3rd-party cookie data goes away the monetization is shifting to the publishers and media owners who are investing appropriately in their 1st-party-data, and there’s a major opportunity to create profitable growth. Investing in technology to help power this growth is crucial and will separate the winners from the losers during this period of change.

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Cookieless Environments Robustly Support Advanced Behavioral Targeting https://www.admonsters.com/cookieless-environments-robustly-support-advanced-behavioral-targeting/ Sat, 09 Dec 2023 01:11:18 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=650869 Google Chrome’s loss of third-party cookies may mean a definite ending to decades of cookie-based targeting. However, other browsers waved goodbye to this tracking method long ago, and many Chrome users already opted out of being followed around the web for a while now. As a result, advertisers urgently need to put solutions in place to continue reaching consumers with ads that are relevant to them. But what tools are out there to help advertisers deliver?

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The deprecation of third-party cookies has been one of the most talked about topics within digital advertising for the past few years. However, the reality is that cookieless environments are already here, providing challenges for advertisers.

Google Chrome’s loss of third-party cookies may mean a definite ending to decades of cookie-based targeting. However, other browsers waved goodbye to this tracking method long ago, and many Chrome users already opted out of being followed around the web for a while now.

As a result, advertisers urgently need to put solutions in place to continue reaching consumers with ads that are relevant to them. But what tools are out there to help advertisers deliver?

Established Tools

As with developments in any field, some methods are more mature than others. Within digital advertising, contextual tools and external identifiers (EIDs) are well-established answers to the cookieless problem.

Contextual targeting has existed for decades and was once the leading way that online advertising was delivered. Advances in the area have meant the mechanisms are again garnering a lot of attention from advertisers.

Contextual is at its core privacy-friendly, basing the ads served on the content featured on a web page, rather than the user’s data. This approach has been leveled up by the emergence of artificial intelligence, in particular natural language processing.

More similar to third-party cookies, EIDs enable cross-site tracking by transforming the personally identifiable information of users into a deterministic identifier, or a set of device-oriented signals – such as IP address – to a probabilistic identifier.

However, due to their similarity to third-party cookies, EIDs have come under plenty of scrutiny. Regulators aren’t keen on the idea of replacing one privacy-intrusive tool with another, while industry experts have questions over the scalability of that method. Additionally, browsers have introduced technical limitations to allowing these IDs to work by cutting down the information required to build probabilistic identifiers through mechanisms like User-Agent Reduction or Private Relay.

Breakthrough Tools

Alongside these more established mechanisms are a group of emerging tools looking to prove they are the best options for advertisers in cookieless environments, including the Protected Audience API, the Topics API, and publisher-partitioned identifiers (PPIs) and Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs).

The Protected Audience API (PAAPI), part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, replaces cross-site tracking by placing users into interest groups that are passed in the bidstream. Any data needed for improved personalization and bid evaluation is stored in the user’s browser or on an isolated, trusted bidding server.

What makes PAAPI stand out is how it can work with, and be strengthened by, other cookieless tools, making it a promising tool for both retargeting and branding campaigns. It can be combined with other methods – such as PPIs, SDAs, Topics API, and contextual targeting – to enable more precise creation of interest groups, and the more accurate activation of these interest groups.

The Topics API is a less sophisticated targeting API from the Privacy Sandbox. The tool enables the Chrome browser to form a short list of recognizable categories based on the user’s recent browsing history, which is then passed to DSPs to inform the ads that are served. The API is predominantly for upper-funnel campaigns, as its taxonomy of around 470 topics leaves it unable to hyper-personalize.

PPIs and SDAs are favored by publishers because they’re provided with control over how their inventory and audiences are labeled. However, these methods have been slow to gain traction, as publishers are wary of sending them in parallel to cross-site identifiers for fear that the valuable information will be monetized externally.

Data Modeling Imperative for Success

Whichever solutions advertisers begin to explore, they have to understand that not all cookieless environments are the same, so different tools will be needed for varied circumstances – whether that’s between different browsers or when considering same-site or cross-site scenarios.

Different browsers will allow certain practices, while others won’t and not all users will be identifiable. In such cases, it is critical to properly understand those who are and properly extrapolate their characteristics on those who aren’t.

In cross-site circumstances, it’s a little bit more complicated. Marketers may see partitioned environments where each publisher or advertiser’s website sits in a separate silo.

This can be tackled by building lookalike audiences through advanced data modeling, enabling the proper execution of targeting and ad frequency management. Advanced data modeling combined with a selection of cookieless tools will ensure that advertisers can reach audiences across all types of inventory.

A Suite of Solutions

Ultimately, succeeding in the cookie-free world will require solutions consisting of more than one method. There is no silver bullet, but there are such combined solutions in the market that are privacy-friendly. Advertisers need to identify the needs of their business and establish which mix of tools works best for them.

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Data Monetization in the Era of ID Deprecation: Best Practices to Pivot and Evolve Your Data Strategy https://www.admonsters.com/data-monetization-in-the-era-of-id-deprecation-best-practices/ Thu, 31 Aug 2023 14:07:52 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=647581 When it comes to evolving data monetization, some publishers are blessed with substantial strong quality 1P signals, while others rely more heavily on cookie-based identity, with limited access to alternative identifiers. Given these diverse circumstances, there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

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Publishers looking to bolster their data monetization goals in a cookieless environment must examine their unique composition of data signals to determine the best solutions. 

With ID deprecation well underway and consumer privacy legislation on the rise, publishers face more complex obstacles than ever before. Yet the consumer expectation for personalization remains, as does the extreme competition for engaged eyes and ears. 

When it comes to evolving data monetization, publishers are positioned at various levels of sophistication and preparedness. Notably, each publisher possesses a unique composition of data signals. While some are blessed with substantial strong quality 1P signals, others rely more heavily on cookie-based identity, with limited access to alternative identifiers. Given these diverse circumstances, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Nonetheless, there are best practices and levers of control you can employ to shift your strategy and mitigate risk.

The pivotal question emerges: What is the optimal place to start, and what are the best practices for privacy forward data monetization?

First and Foremost, Visibility is Key

A critical place to start is with a thorough understanding of the data signals you have in your arsenal and the data solutions you’ve been selling. Many publishers I’ve spoken with have a significant blind spot when it comes to understanding their data signals and data solutions. You’ll want to understand what percentage of your overall revenue is data-enhanced or has associated targeting. 

Ask yourselves: 

  • Of the data I’m monetizing, how does it break out by data source 1P/2P/3P? For 3P, what is the breakout of that partnership share? 
  • How does what I’m selling break out by different sales channels so that I understand who’s buying? 
  • What about margin and sell-through against these audiences, and how are the patterns changing over time?

Eliminating this informational blind spot is critical to understanding the associated risks and opportunities, as well as enabling the planning of a successful pivot. This tangible data will also be helpful for internal stakeholder understanding and garnering support for subsequent resourcing.

Understand & Prioritize Demand

Likely, you won’t be able to find or create alternative solutions for every audience that once visited your properties. Therefore, it’s imperative to use your analytics and market-facing resources to understand and prioritize demand commensurate with the revenue opportunity. This way, you can best harness your time and resources for the audiences to drive the most data-enhanced revenue.

Diversified Solutions. Play to Your Strengths 

As I previously stated, there is no singular solution for any given publisher, so tactics will vary from publisher to publisher. Thus, the critical question surfaces: Are you maximizing the existing signals and capabilities and creating new signals and solutions?

First Party Data. You knew this was coming. We can answer in unison that 1P strategy has to be an area of focus, but what steps are you taking to maximize the impact of your 1P assets? Pep talk — this is data that’s differentiated to you, isn’t commoditized (hopefully), and is within your control to be of solid quality and lasting. Evaluate and consider all the declared, observed, and inferred data sets at your disposal. Are you leveraging them to create desirable solutions? Are there opportunities for you to develop panel-based offerings and modeled solutions? Always remember the relationship between scale and precision to develop offerings that will adequately map to your client’s needs and KPIs.

Not every publisher’s business is well poised for a login. Having a logged-in user creates immense opportunities for 1P offerings. Remember that logged-in doesn’t mean a paywall, nor must it be required or offered for an entire user base. There are many best practices a publisher can utilize to increase a user’s likelihood of logging in. It comes down to value exchange and whether or not you reward users properly for the information you want them to share. 

Ask yourselves: 

  • What is your primary asset that might be valuable to exchange? 
  • Is there early access to information, premium features, events, trials, etc.? 
  • Is there a subset of your audience that would be highly receptive to a login invitation? 
  • What cuts of your audience or questions might you want to test? 

To succeed in this capacity, you’ll want proper value exchange and to make the login process as frictionless as possible.

Contextual. Contextual solutions have many benefits, and increasingly, marketers are seeking these offerings. Absent reliance on individual identifiers, contextual solutions are privacy-forward and offer efficient real-time adjacency to content of interest. Contextual offerings should be low-hanging fruit for every publisher to explore and create aligned to customer needs.

2P Data. Marketer use of their 1P assets has been steadily growing for years. Brands have been making strides in increasing these data sets and their sophistication in practical use. Having the technology, process, and business guidelines in place to partner with marketers in this way will open up revenue for publishers.

Data Collaboration. Data Clean Room solutions have the potential for privacy-safe data collaboration and many clean rooms support use cases for activation, data enrichment, as well as measurement. Initially slower than expected adoption, marketers, pubs, and agencies are increasingly evaluating Data Clean Rooms. They also open up the possibilities for increased insights-based selling, particularly for publishers who don’t have their own proprietary insights tools.

ID Solution Testing. Given the many ID solutions available in the market, there is potential for enabling cross-device audience reach. Evaluating and testing these solutions is another lever for publishers to flex amidst declining identifiers to garner scale and performance potentially.

Packaging & Pricing. In addition to better leveraging existing assets and creating new solutions, consider your packaging and pricing efforts. 

Ask yourselves: 

  • Are your data offerings structured optimally and priced to yield maximum market value? 
  • Are you allowing customers to buy your most premium targets without minimum spend requirements or media commitments that will make their media efforts more impactful?

Sales Enablement & Commercialization

The evolution of your offering will only be as good as your ability to communicate and sell through these changes to your buyer. Be sure your evolving data strategy is also effectively commercialized and communicated to sales. You can’t overstate the complexity of these changes, so you’ll want to be thorough in your rollout to sellers and those on the front lines. 

Remember that these challenges are industry-wide and not unique to any given publisher. Continue to hone reporting mechanisms and put the proper market feedback loop in place so that you can monitor your progress, improve, and drive replicable wins. 

 

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Whose Data Is It Anyway? Buyers? Sellers? No, Theirs. https://www.admonsters.com/whose-data-is-it/ Fri, 20 May 2022 03:11:21 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=634517 Moving forward, it may seem a no-brainer to pubs, that in this privacy-forward era, users should either subscribe or provide morsels of information in exchange for content that is meaningful and relevant to them (which would include advertising), but maybe there really is another way. And maybe that other way really puts consumers first.

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Considering what I do for work, I’m loath to admit I hardly watch ads. Like, almost, never.

Usually, that’s prime time to catch up on Twitter or do something else entirely. Well, that’s unless it’s visually arresting or there’s music that halts my attention (but, oh, damn, I forgot about those commerce ads on IG). Then there are also those rare instances when I’m voraciously consuming a YouTuber’s content and start feeling like I’m cheating them out of their income — so I end up pressing skip a little less often.

Now if somehow your brain got to thinking this is going to be about how irrelevant and uninspiring advertising can be and that’s why it doesn’t work, well, it isn’t. Well, at least, not directly.

It’s about how I dug myself into a rabbit hole after a Privacy on iPhone | Data Auction ad stopped me (deer in headlights) in my tracks and led me to recollect a prep call from earlier this week for our upcoming AdMonsters Ops Conference on June 6 – 7, 2022, for a session called Whose Data Is It Anyway? that started me thinking about another session we’re having called What Happens to Advertising When Consumers Own Their Data? and then that led me to Streamlytics’ newly released framework for valuing consumer data, which led me to revisit Loeb & Loeb’s Jessica B. Lee’s The Value of Talking About the Value of Consumer Data, which then led me to revisit Brave’s Luke Mulks’ Back to Advertising Basics with Web3, which reminded me that in April, last year, I wrote that Apple’s ATT could be a bridge to rebuilding consumer trust. Whew!

And then it all came full circle and I realized I wasn’t just traversing down a rabbit hole…all of these things were interconnected and they are all pointing toward what the future of advertising in a privacy-first world is destined to become.

When I heard the bid caller cry, “The next sale is a digital treasure trove. Charming Ellie’s private data,” my ears pricked up. There’s another bit where he exclaims, “It’s not creepy, it’s commerce.” Check it out for yourself…

It was clever. It was personal. It was impactful. Though the ad presented nothing that would be remotely surprising to anyone in ad tech land, still, the ad hit different, because it hit home.

#AdMonstersOps SPOILER ALERT: I then remembered that what I thought was going to be a conversation about who owns audience data or contextual data — either buyers or sellers — and whose data was more valuable — with heavy hitters like Jana Meron, SVP of Programmatic & Data Strategy Insider; Myles Younger; VP, Go-to-market, Data, Media.Monks; George Stella, Co-Founder, BIGtoken and Data Privacy Protocol Alliance; and Scott Messer, SVP, Media, Leaf Group — instead ended up being a conversation about consumer ownership of their data, how they achieve that, and why we need a new state of data — separate from 1PD, 2PD, and 3PD — to define the degrees of separation from the consumer because it’s on their device and whether we choose to call that data ZPD or 0PD or whatever, and the role that Big G or Apple could have in all of that. All really fascinating stuff that you’ll have to attend Ops to hear and learn more about, so I should really stop sharing it now, shh. Ok.

At Ops, there will also be a separate conversation specifically about the consumer ownership aspect of data with three other companies that are somewhat similar to BIGtoken, in that they all help consumers to own their data and earn from it:

Whether consumers should actually be paid for their data or whether the value is even a drop in the bucket, or whether they would even care to engage in such transactions and manage their own data in this way is all really hotly debatable stuff.

And companies like BIGtoken, Streamlytics, Caden, and Reklaim will all tell you they have enough users (and partners like ad tech companies and agencies and brands) to prove that this is the exact direction things are going to move in. And a company like Streamlytics (disclaimer, I’m a microinvestor) even plans to open source their data valuation algorithms, so once that thing is in the wild who knows.

Could all of ad tech’s evils finally be coming home to roost?

Now I’m not insinuating that ad tech is inherently evil, but there have been loads of unsavory practices that directly led the industry into the very hot seat that it’s sitting in today.

The Cambridge Analyticas. The lack of transparency. The creepiness factor.  The scammers. The whole lot of it finally pissed consumers the efffff off.

But still, without advertising, there is no open web.

And without an open web, there is no equity. And while Web3 — a decentralized, blockchain-based web owned and operated by users (no, it isn’t just crypto) — promises to democratize the web, remember that Web1 and Web2 assured that as well and they ended up giving us, that’s right you guessed it — big tech. And sure it gave us influencers and creators too, but…

The truth is that Web3 is largely being built by those who have most profited from Web2, so where’s the inclusion in that?

For the open web to survive, there has to be an explicitly communicated contract between people (consumers/users) and companies (publishers and their partners). Publishers have been calling the unwritten version of this contract the value exchange,  but that agreement hasn’t been communicated properly, like ever. And so it’s been misunderstood, by the consumer, that content is free. And it also allowed for consumers’ data to be (mis)used for sundry purposes that had nothing to do with the intended applications.

Moving forward, it may seem a no-brainer to pubs, that in this privacy-forward era, users should either subscribe or provide morsels of information in exchange for content that is meaningful and relevant to them (which would include advertising), but maybe there really is another way.

Maybe there needs to be some sort of more formal arrangement and self-service tools to allow users to control and monitor how their data is being used and shared. And maybe it even offers them a little cash in exchange. And then maybe the less it all seems like hocus pocus or Dr. Strange-level sorcery to them, the more they’d be willing to share.

Sure, all sorts of questions remain, like: Is the data quality? Is the data fresh? How would you build audience segments? How would you layer this data? How would you scale this data? You know, all of the same questions that we have always had about first-party data.

But isn’t this a grand time to start figuring out how to get all of this stuff right…finally?

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What Is CTDPA? https://www.admonsters.com/what-is-ctdpa/ Wed, 04 May 2022 18:48:58 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=633534 Last week the Connecticut House of Representatives and Connecticut Senate joined forces to pass the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTDPA). The legislation, also known as Senate Bill 6 (SB6), awaits Governor Ned Lamont's signature to make everything 100% official. The bill is expected to take effect on July 1, 2023. 

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It’s a big ‘ol data privacy party at this point. We’ve seen privacy legislation go into effect in Virginia, Colorado, California, Vermont, Utah, and now Connecticut will join the fete with the introduction of CTDPA.

Last week the Connecticut House of Representatives and Connecticut Senate joined forces to pass the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTDPA). The legislation, also known as Senate Bill 6 (SB6), awaits Governor Ned Lamont’s signature to make everything 100% official. The bill is expected to take effect on July 1, 2023. 

The CTDPA mirrors recently instilled state privacy laws, allowing consumers to opt-out of data sales, targeted ads, and profiling decisions that “produce legal or similarly significant effects concerning the consumer.” This new provision will also include protection for minors and biometric data.

I know your next question is, what types of pubs would this apply to?

  • Pubs that do business in CT or produce products or services targeted at residents
  • Pubs that control or process consumer data of at least 100,000 people a year or gain over 25% of gross revenue from the “sale” of personal data and control or process the data of at least 25,000 people a year.

The consumer side of me says, “Way to go!” Yet, the ad tech side is thinking, “Darn.” Each new state privacy law only adds more and more hoops for pubs to jump through.

Get in the Know About CTDPA

If you are wondering what aspect of “consumer data” will be guarded by CTDPA, it is the information connected to an identified person. This does not include any information about someone that is public or considered de-identified data.

This is the second stab at a privacy law by the “Constitution State,” remember, Connecticut tried it last year and failed. This go-round, the bill is coming on strong and will even include the “right to cure” clause giving pubs some time to do some damage control before getting hit with a lawsuit. If you are caught violating the rules? Forget about it. There will be no time at that point to fix the infraction, and you may even get accused of “soliciting user consent.”

Pubs have a 60-day fix-it period to figure out reported violations until December 21, 2024. Starting January 1, 2025, the CTDPA will only grant a cure period if the Connecticut Attorney General sees fit, so be careful.

With the CTDPA opt-in consent for sensitive data is a must. Racial origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health condition or diagnosis, sexual orientation, sexual history, immigration status, genetic or biometric data, children’s data, and geolocation data are all included.

Speaking of children, pubs will have to get opt-in consent from consumers under the age of 16 before using their data to target ads or monetize. You have to keep the kids first because when it comes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, you don’t want any problems.

Like privacy laws in Colorado and Virginia, CT consumers will have the authority to appeal a denial of a consumer request.

How Will CTDPA Affect the Advertising Ecosystem?

At the rate things are going, pubs will continue to be stuck in a cycle of scrambling to find new ways to identify consumers. While these state privacy laws are seemingly a step in the right direction for consumers, they sometimes create extra work for pubs and outsourcing vendors.

Many publishers feel they may go bald before Federal privacy legislation sees the light of day, but President Biden has been making baby steps in that direction after discovering a recent “national experiment” by big tech that utilized children’s data.

Potus said, “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.”

Whether it is a child or your great-great-grandma, pubs will continue to have to dip and dive through many loopholes when it comes to targeted ads and addressability because those violation consequences ain’t pretty.

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SMH, WTF Is ZPD (Zero-party Data)?! https://www.admonsters.com/what-is-zero-party-data/ Thu, 21 Apr 2022 15:46:06 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=632161 Simply put, ZPD is information that consumers intentionally volunteer about themselves in exchange for a more personalized experience with the media companies and brands they trust. It's the purest source of truth about their relevant characteristics, behaviors, and preferences because it’s sourced directly from them.

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Remember in the 90s when the Internet felt like the Wild West? People didn’t trust one another (or brands or media companies for that matter), there were no high-speed connections, and things could get lawless at the drop of a drunken cowboy’s hat.

Things are (a bit) more civilized now. Publishers, advertisers, and consumers all inhabit their own hyper-connected corners of the web, navigating them with relative ease. It’s as if we’ve all constructed our own digital neighborhoods, complete with nosy neighbors and our preferred shops, all under the watchful eye of local law enforcement. 

But when you move to a new place, you get to know the community at your own pace. You make connections and volunteer information to neighbors when you deem it valuable or necessary. You control who you are and how you’re seen. 

Online, consumers give their personal data to brands, publishers, retailers, financial services companies, and all manner of “nosy neighbors” without thinking twice. And, largely unbeknownst to them, many of these nosy neighbors are busy behind the scenes gossiping – harvesting, trading, manipulating, and stockpiling their audiences’ personal information like the incredibly precious asset it is.

In return – theoretically – consumers are promised better products, services, and experiences. And to some extent, that’s been the case. But this “value exchange” is lopsided: it hasn’t given consumers any control or power over who gets to know them and in what capacity. Despite all the progress that’s been made online, it feels like consumers have lost a great deal of personal agency when it comes to building the relationships they actually want in their digital neighborhood. 

But now, consumers and brands are starting to wake up to this power differential. The advertising and marketing industry has anticipated this inflection point for quite some time now – but despite the heads up, brands and publishers have struggled to formulate a substantive, unified gameplan to navigate this dynamic shift.

On top of it all, governments around the world continue to regulate how data and privacy are protected, following in the footsteps of the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. One of the most important paradigm shifts behind this coming revolution is zero-party data or ZPD.

What Is Zero-Party Data?

Simply put, ZPD is information that consumers intentionally volunteer about themselves in exchange for a more personalized experience with the media companies and brands they trust. It’s the purest source of truth about their relevant characteristics, behaviors, and preferences because it’s sourced directly from them.

You could say ZPD represents a movement. One aimed at consumers clawing back their personal agency and reclaiming the power of their own data (which, by the way, is already theirs thanks to sea-change regulations like GDPR and CCPA).

So far, collecting ZPD has been limited to direct-to-brand relationships: like when a customer fills out a form telling a hotel their room preferences. In this model, every brand constructs its own separate profile of who that person is – either as a customer or prospect – and then puts the onus on the consumer (if the brand cares to make it possible at all) to add, remove, or edit the data in their profile. All while continually adding more information to that profile through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data sources.

The reality is this situation is fast becoming untenable. With the growing number of digital relationships in our lives, it’s become a Sisyphean task to delete inaccurate information, protect ourselves from fraud or sever any unwanted connections. And it’s incredibly labor-intensive (read: expensive) for brands to manage everything they know about us.

If we choose to interact with a brand, then the onus should be on them to actually, factually understand who we are in a way that benefits us. For brands, that means adopting the mindset or developing the flexibility to meet the consumer where they’re at, one to one.

That’s always been the holy grail of targeted advertising in the first place, right?

Real, accurate knowledge obtained from consenting consumers who actually want your business. By shifting to a ZPD structure and allowing consumers to initiate the conversation, brands are able to preemptively optimize their media budgets because the audience targeting homework has already been done. And the best part is you don’t even have to cheat off the smartest kid in your class to do it. 

Likewise for publishers, with ZPD, ad inventory is already pre-optimized because the consumer explicitly shares their reading interests ahead of time.

Likewise for publishers, with ZPD, ad inventory is already pre-optimized because the consumer explicitly shares their reading interests ahead of time.

You won’t have to gamble on content that may or may not stick with a reach-audience; audience experts at brands won’t have to expend as much time, energy, or resources to identify new segments – because, again, the segment comes to them. ZPD is a literal win-win-win… win – yes, that’s four wins – if you take into consideration the fact that ZPD also solves the cookieless conundrum vexing the industry today.

But first – first we have to take back control of our data.

We’ve seen what happens when we are not vigilant and our data falls into nefarious hands – as in the case of Cambridge Analytica. That was effectively ZPD gone wrong. Millions of users unwittingly participated in ZPD collection schemes, creating grossly comprehensive psychological profiles which threatened our very democracy. This demonstrates the risk at hand – what we as consumers should be fighting against – but also the opportunity if ZPD could be deployed at scale for the betterment of the web.

Zero-Party Data Is Zero-Prey Data

Believe it or not, it’s been 28 years since the first e-commerce transaction. Since then, we’ve seen the rise (and some falls) of multiple e-commerce giants. True, our relationships with brands and publishers have gotten more secure and personalized along the way, but we’re still miles away from being truly consumer-centric.

Part of the reason is that brands and publishers are locked into the ecosystems they inhabit. In a way, they’ve become prey to their own (un)virtuous cycle they helped to create. Targeted advertising capabilities rely on a costly, difficult-to-renovate, and intricate trenchwork of 1st/2nd/3rd party data, expensive tech, and partnerships.

This means the prospect of divesting from these systems – which, for many companies, has taken the better part of a decade to accumulate, implement, and staff – is a really hard pill to swallow. Even if an objectively better, streamlined solution – ZPD – is looking them straight in their cartoonish, dollar-sign eyeballs. 

But things aren’t much better under the status quo for consumers either.

The reality is, we are constantly preyed upon by brands online offering supremely irrelevant products and offers, and by publishers who insist on serving listicles “we think you’ll love” after one accidental click on an archived Labor Day article from 2017.

These inefficiencies are one of the many, many reasons why consumers continue to swing adblockers at carousel ads and prerolls like it’s Sunday tee-ball practice. In short, the brand/consumer/publisher triangle is tired, predatory and outdated – but worst of all, it makes it harder for actually relevant ads and content recommendations to cut past consumers’ ad-selective hearing.

ZPD helps re-balance this value exchange.

ZPD helps re-balance this value exchange. It restores the agency of the consumer, affording them the ability to either volunteer or withhold their data – in effect, their digital identity – to brands at will. Furthermore, ZPD is authoritative, not observational. You’re not relying on a game of telephone played by third and fourth parties to matchmake you with brands. That one-off refrigerator purchase should no longer follow you around the web for years like a hunter stalking its prey.

And eventually, your data won’t have to sit in an unreachable database, potentially exposed to theft or abuse by nefarious actors. This is a realization that thousands of consumer brands are now coming to: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-party data is expensive to collect, manage, secure, process, glean insights from and keep compliant. In many cases, it’s even become more of a liability than an asset. 

Zero-Party Data Is Happy Data 

ZPD should make all parties – consumers, brands, and media companies – happier when it comes to personal data.

Consumers get more control and agency, which means more trust; brands don’t have to worry as much about byzantine data management processes, and media companies get to optimize inventory and develop content without the need for guesswork.

Currently, there is no technological barrier to instituting and normalizing zero-party data. In fact, if anything, it should alleviate much of the headache brands and publishers face as they shift into a cookieless future at the behest of GDPR and CCPA.

The only change required for brands is the adoption of a true consumer-first mindset when it comes to using their customers’ data to create better business outcomes. Likewise, for media companies, it means working in coordination – not unilaterally – with consumers about their data and their preferences.

For consumers, having more control over ZPD will streamline personal data and privacy management.

My work at Caden is concerned with making that experience fit for this new future. With the advent of centralized digital safety deposit boxes, like the Caden Vault, consumers can begin lending out their personal information to their preferred brands and publishers at their own pace, while denying access to those they deem untrustworthy.

Brands and publishers can – and should – view this as an opportunity to scale back the cost and headache of in-house data warehousing, and utilizing Caden as a literal turn-key portal to accessing only the relevant information for the relevant (and consenting) consumers.  

Good, clean, timeline, relevant data makes everyone happier, including other nodes in the brand/consumer/publisher ecosystem. Because it’s not just a better, cleaner way of conducting e-commerce, it also enables more effective communications and media strategies. When individuals voluntarily share their ZPD, brands and their suppliers can use it in ways that actually enhance relationships, engender loyalty, and increase lifetime value.

ZPD is a timely answer to the over-proliferation and abuse of personal data. For the average consumer, ZPD is their ticket to personal agency, affording them complete domain over their digital identity and online destiny. And for brands and publishers, it’s an antidote to the increasingly onerous demands of data management, compliance, and privacy regulations  – which means you can continue to pursue those one-to-one customer relationships with the customers you actually want, and not just the ones you think you need. 

The post SMH, WTF Is ZPD (Zero-party Data)?! appeared first on AdMonsters.

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Webinar Replay: No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World https://www.admonsters.com/webinar-replay-ranker-on-first-party-data-in-a-privacy-safe-world/ Mon, 13 Dec 2021 16:50:45 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=625180 How can publishers future proof their businesses by turning requests coming in from advertisers into privacy-first, first-party data strategies, especially as the third-party cookie goes away?

That's exactly what attendees learned at our recent webinar — No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World — as Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker and Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, talked about their partnership and how it helped Ranker realize 4X revenue increase YOY and  25% increase in RFP win rate within six months.

The post Webinar Replay: No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World appeared first on AdMonsters.

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How can publishers future proof their businesses by turning requests coming in from advertisers into privacy-first, first-party data strategies, especially as the third-party cookie goes away?

That’s exactly what attendees learned at our recent webinar — No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World — as Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker and Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, talked about their partnership and how it helped Ranker realize 4X revenue increase YOY and  25% increase in RFP win rate within six months.

Check out the webinar on-demand now:

In this webinar you’ll learn:

  • How to identify your audience without knowing their identity
  • The value of collecting rich first-party data and how to activate it
  • Why you need to safeguard your business for a privacy-first world
  • Why a multipronged approach is the best path forward — marrying contextual, first-party data and zero-party data
  • The difference between publisher cohorts and FLoC
  • Why edge computing is better, faster, safer than cloud computing for processing data in a privacy-compliant way
  • How Ranker saw a 4X increase in revenue year-on-year and a 25% increase in RFP win rate within six months of partnering with Permutive

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How USA TODAY Sports Is Developing First-Party Authentication Strategies for Building Consumer Trust https://www.admonsters.com/first-party-authentication-strategies/ Thu, 22 Apr 2021 22:59:02 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=565604 Jason White, SVP and Head of Publishers, LiveRamp, and Chris Pirrone, General Manager, USA TODAY, Sports Media Group, take AdMonsters Senior Editor, Lynne d Johnson, on a deep dive discussion into the world of publisher first-party authentication strategies. "If cookies were the currency before, the gold is that relationship with that consumer and building that relationship," says White.

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As the cookie continues to crumble and publishers hone in on their first-party data strategies, building authenticated audiences to improve inventory value has become all the more important.

“If cookies were the currency before, the gold is that relationship with that consumer and building that relationship,” says Jason White, SVP and Head of Publishers, LiveRamp.

And that’s exactly why LiveRamp built their Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), to enable publishers to continue to perform data-driven targeting in a cookieless world.

I had a deep-dive discussion about publisher first-party authentication strategies with White and Chris Pirrone, VP & General Manager, USA TODAY Sports Media Group, where they discussed the importance of publishers growing their addressable inventory and how they can better communicate the value exchange to their audiences to build trusted relationships that can be leveraged for authentication — and ultimately grow revenue. (To hear the full conversation, click here.)

WITH THE SUPPORT OF LiveRamp
LiveRamp connects people, data, and devices across the digital and physical world, allowing consumers to connect with brands.

Growing Addressable Inventory

Lynne d Johnson: Should publishers be looking at growing their addressable inventory as part of their direct sales and first-party data strategies?

Chris Pirrone: Yes, developing strategies where publishers are engaged with consumers on a more intimate level, where pubs are providing audiences with some kind of service, content, or product that drives users to engage, and in exchange, the user is willing to provide personal information—email address, interests, and things like that—I think it has always been a smart strategy for publishers. 

It’s become more intense recently because the third-party cookie is going to dissipate and therefore publishers and marketers can’t rely on third-party cookies or third-party data any longer. Publishers that have a history of requiring users to sign in because they’ve offered some benefit in exchange for signing in are ahead of the game. For publishers who haven’t had to implement this, it’s going to be even more important for them to begin creating those products because data-driven and programmatic advertising dollars are at risk.

Without third-party cookies driving targeted advertising—publishers that don’t have a strategy to drive user authentication and first-party data, should expect lower CPMs and less revenue. This is why we’ve tried to partner with platforms like LiveRamp to create ideas that drive: 

  1. More authentication, more sign-in, and then, 
  2. How do we turn those authenticated users into ad dollars that are going to help us pay for content creation and to provide valuable experiences and information to users?

Jason White: We’re empowering folks like Chris, who are spearheading this new wave of authentication. Third-party cookies were a flawed identifier and caused the industry to lose the trust of the consumer.

At the end of the day, this needed to happen. There wasn’t trust. There wasn’t transparency. And GDPR, CCPA, all of these privacy regulations were inflection points that needed to happen for us to build a more trusted ecosystem. Folks like Chris are visionaries in the sense that they understand this and are building strategies around it to grow. We have an opportunity to restore that trust through strong first-party relationships, and as an industry, we should lean into transparency and control for the consumer. 

LdJ: Ok, but what about growing addressable inventory with relation to the open exchange or PMP programmatic strategy — should publishers also do this?

CP: I think the impact is equally important for programmatic. Most publishers are monetizing a significant portion of their inventory through programmatic advertising and open market bidding. If you’re a large-scale publisher, you have too much volume to be able to sell it all directly. If you’re a small-scale publisher, you can’t afford a direct sales team.  

The most successful publishers out there have been able to capitalize on contextual targeting, plus the open programmatic marketplace because those pubs understand how programmatic works, and they have built their ad stacks to drive competition from the demand side. And then the DSPs have come in for marketers, leveraging the marketer’s own data, cookies—and have created bidding strategies that drive ROI for marketers. 

If a publisher can create quality content, engage quality audiences, and build a competent advertising yield set-up, they have had a pretty good solution the last few years. If you’re a trusted quality publisher that creates interesting content that attracts quality audiences that want to stay on your site, then you’ve been in a pretty good spot with direct sales, and quality advertisers leveraging open programmatic, to fill your inventory.

What we’ve seen with some of the browsers that already deprecated cookies is that CPMs fall significantly. If marketers don’t know anything about these users based on third-party tracking and cookies, they’re less willing to bid higher or spend to reach those users. If they’re not able to retarget or frequency cap, all these tactics that DSPs have built successful ROI models around, it has a big impact on programmatic CPMs and it’s going to have a big impact on publisher businesses going forward.

JW: Google put out a great study in August  2019, before the IAB came out with Project Rearc. Google ran tests showing that the median CPM was going to decrease by 64%, and we’ve seen that in working with some of our publishers.

What we got in front of, in beginning to bring ATS to bear more than four years ago, was getting more marketers bidding on Identity Link (IDL). We already work with the top 400 marketers on activation and measurement, leveraging our identity solution. This is the next step—being able to reach customers and measure on IDL. 

The most important thing to help folks like Chris with now is analytics. We have models to help them understand in an A/B testing environment: What does it mean from a CPM perspective? How many more dollars am I capturing from those campaigns buying on IDL? What’s the bounce rate? How much more revenue did I make to offset that bounce rate? And am I positive, and in the green? If I’m in the green, let’s get a little more aggressive—maybe we ask for email earlier in the session. 

One of the things we’ve seen from our studies on cookie syncs is the match rate on the publisher side is in the 30-35% range. The marketers talk to the DMP, which connects to the DSP, then the SSP. And each of those systems has its own definition of identity (as a cookie) so each sync creates a ton of data loss. 

The reality is, we think about an amount of 30% authentications for publishers will yield the same if not better results in terms of addressable reach for marketers 1p/2p/3p audiences. When users authenticate, it’s more efficient than a cookie and with LiveRamp, those cookie syncs become irrelevant.

Are Buyers on Board?

LdJ: One of the big questions I’m hearing from publishers is they want to know if the buyers will be there?

CP: It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. Publishers will implement solutions where they can attract dollars. Over the last few years, publishers have seen shifts in ad spend from open programmatic to programmatic direct deals to now programmatic guaranteed. As soon as the marketers invested in those new channels, publishers siloed quality inventory and started to segment out their inventory to support the demand-side strategies. And they’ll do the same thing here with authentication and first-party data.

Publishers suddenly have an advantage with authentication and first-party data because we are offering something to marketers that they can't easily get elsewhere.

JW: Oh they’re there. It’s all about scale. We’ve had a good chunk of our 400 marketers active in 2020. Moreso in the past quarter because we’re integrated with The Trade Desk. And it’s a virtuous cycle that Chris is talking about, more dollars in, more publishers in, more publishers get authentication, it enables marketers to put more of their budgets towards campaigns based on authentications.

We’ve got case studies where marketers like Fitbit have seen 2X ROAS. That’s incredible because they’re reaching individual users. So we’re seeing more repeat marketers put dollars in quarter over quarter. We’ve got over 340 global publishers signed or live—65% of the Comscore 50, 70% of the Comscore 20; the big publishers are leaning in. The rest of the publishers are working to catch up. 

CP:  Publishers suddenly have an advantage with authentication and first-party data because we are offering something to marketers that they can’t easily get elsewhere. An issue arises for publishers with lower return visitors or when significant traffic comes from search or social shares, where a user is referred and seeking a single piece of content, and then they exit after consuming that piece. Authenticating these users is difficult and requires a dedicated strategy to get somebody to sign in when they may only want that one piece of information.

But there are different methods we can implement to help, and LiveRamp has written a Playbook that we contributed to. How can we, as Publishers, start to convert some of these visitors into dedicated users who will provide their first-party data or even zero-party data? Zero-party data is the next step to deeper engagement, where users voluntarily tell you their interests and what they like, so pubs can build up our data segments to be more knowledgeable about our most valuable customers. 

JW: This is where having a CRM expert comes into play—they’ve been doing this on the marketer’s side for years. They understand cohorts, who are the most valuable consumers we have and we need to tailor our messages (and our spending) accordingly based on who we are trying to acquire. You’re now seeing agencies hire heads of identity and even Gannett has a head of identity. 

These experts will start building these databases and look at people coming in to consume one piece of content or two pieces and say, “How valuable is that content? Let’s score that content. Is it extremely valuable? What’s the bounce rate?” If it’s small, they could put up a paywall for that type of user before they access the content because they know the content is extremely valuable for that individual user. This is taking the publisher paradigm to the next level—where they are going to have to think more like a marketer. 

Small or Large Pub, It Really Doesn’t Matter

LdJ: Large-scale sites like Chris’ have a lot of authenticated traffic and might be thinking they can go at this alone, are they thinking right about this? Also, what about smaller pubs that might be afraid they won’t have enough scale?

JW: This isn’t just a big publisher solution. Small publishers can play here as well.

It’s important to note that for the bigger publishers that think that they can go at it on their own, they need to think like marketers. Marketers face the same kind of constraints of working through roadmaps and only having a certain amount of resources to get those roadmaps completed. They’re thinner margin businesses. And on their side of the equation, they only have a certain amount of buyers. They’re only going to be able to work with this walled garden or that walled garden, and then everybody else. If a publisher is big enough, they could do a big thing with a music player or social media property, but the reality is they’re going to be stretched thin and nobody else is going to be able to use their data. 

What marketers want is the same thing they get from the walled gardens. It’s simple to buy an ad on a walled garden—your mother can buy an ad on Facebook. So let’s not make the open web complicated, let’s make it just as easy. Someone can go into a DSP and get access to the entire open web. Marketers want to connect with their consumers across publisher sites— whether through open exchange or private marketplace deals. Marketers don’t want to do 1,000+ direct deals, they want to be able to buy their audiences at scale. This is why publishers need to integrate with a neutral identity infrastructure but retain control over which marketers and platforms can access their data. 

CP: We have audience scale, but there’s still a hurdle to getting someone to take out their credit card for a subscription or to authenticate. When larger publishers drive significant traffic from search or social shares, those users generally visit focused on a specific piece of content and are unauthenticated. And so the question for pubs is how do you select a point in the user journey on your site to convert a visitor to a declared sign-in visitor? Publishers must get creative and think of ways to get visitors to lean in. 

And if you’re a small verticalized publisher, you’re going to need to implement some of the same things we are as a larger publisher—the same engagement tactics and authentication methods and strategies. Which parts of your site/content/products are most valuable for users? 

Tips For Increasing User Authentications

LdJ: For publishers looking to increase authentications, what are some strategies that you recommend they test? 

CP: It depends on where you believe your strengths are. Why are consumers coming to your site? How do they find you? The people that are sticking around and consuming additional content, why are they doing so? If you can start to analyze and dissect that, I think it’s going to lead you to strategies and tactics that you can implement that are going to help you drive authentication. 

Our well over 200+ local properties are important for helping local audiences find news and information. The local properties provide unique information, reporting, and coverage that is very distinct and valuable. To provide additional value to consumers, we may also create events that drive local engagement. Because we’re a trusted local voice, audiences are more likely to perceive a value-exchange that leads to authentication or a subscription. 

But even if you are not focused on local information, there are other ways you can start to build engagement—giveaways, events, even partnering with marketers to provide sweepstakes, or creating fun games that people can play online. Can we create valuable products and reasonable engagement points in a user visit where people are willing to sign-in to access this information? These are just slight tweaks where you already have a relationship with the audience, but now how do you drive deeper engagement and get those passionate audiences to authenticate.

Newsletters are certainly really important. Those are your most dedicated fans who have declared that they want to hear from you on a regular basis. Another method is article commenting. There was a time when publishers said it’s too hard to control comments so let’s push it to the social platforms. The truth is, commenters are generally the highest engaged users who want to have a conversation or provide a point of view. Why not let them do that on your site by first requiring authentication, plus drive additional user engagement and thoughtful conversation by having editorial people participate and engage in the discussion? That is going to drive more people to sign up so they can participate in message boards or comments. 

How about calendaring applications? We are all busy, and if you analyze events and the sports cycle, there are almost too many daily games to track. It’s hard to follow who is playing and when. Offering a calendar service for a user to download their favorite team’s schedule will remind them of important events or moments, and you can also update the calendar event with valuable data, information and include links back to your site that has content about the event, analysis, and previews.

Additionally, one thing I think we can generally do better as an industry is to improve the user experience around requesting user sign-in and building trust with consumers.

Are your users interested in alerts, updates, or real-time scoring? Those are some of the things just about every publisher can do to create value and incentivize a user to sign-in for a valuable service. I approach this from a sport’s fan’s perspective, but there are a lot of different and nuanced tricks of the trade to provide user value and help drive audiences to give you their information.

Additionally, one thing I think we can generally do better as an industry is to improve the user experience around requesting user sign-in and building trust with consumers. If the user experience is similar across trusted digital publishers—with authentication requests looking the same, having the same verbiage and color scheme, and requesting the same type of information in the same manner across trusted publishers—that builds consumer confidence. But if I have to go and sign in at each and every website I visit, and each requires different data points from me, and the UX is a different experience, it starts to build confusion and mistrust. If we collaborate industry-wide and start using the same methods for asking for audience permission, I think that’s going to allow consumers to feel more trusting and willing to provide their information.

LdJ: What should publishers be watching for as they’re thinking about increasing authentications without negatively impacting consumer experience?

JW: It’s the value exchange. Are you providing something of value? Earlier we talked about scoring content and assigning value for it. We’ve got data showing that addressable Safari inventory can yield up to 300-350% higher CPMs than cookieless inventory. Once a publisher sees value, the next question is, “How can I make this the most relevant experience for that consumer and provide them with the incentive to give me that information? If I don’t then they’re going to bounce.”

So make sure you’re dialed into that when you deploy these authentication strategies. Provide them with as many options to make it easy, ask them to sign in with their email address or social sign-in. But let’s make it consistent as Chris talked about earlier.

CP: If you can create a frictionless and seamless sign-in experience. Step 1—remember me when I return to your site. Or, for example, if a user clicks on a hyperlink to a publisher site and has already downloaded the publisher’s mobile app, the user should be linked directly into the app so they are seamlessly redirected to the mobile experience. That user is likely to stay longer and consume more content. If it’s a difficult experience and every time I visit I hit a blocker requiring me to reauthenticate and re-sign-in, I won’t stay and am unlikely to return. 

Publishers must work extremely hard with our internal product teams and the UX teams to make sure that we’re providing a great experience. As Jason said, figure out where in the user experience there is an engagement point that we can ask for authentication. An important key is remembering a returning user when they visit across multiple devices and don’t block them the next time they visit, because they’ve already signed up. We are going to quickly see who’s successful at identifying their repeat users and who isn’t. 

I believe publishers need to work together to share best practices for optimal user experiences, so we build back trust with consumers. Only then will audiences be more willing to provide their personal data because they know it’s being used to help pay for quality experiences and content.

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What Do Smart Collaborative Data Solutions Between Pubs and Third-Party Data Providers Actually Look Like? https://www.admonsters.com/smart-collaborative-data-solutions/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 01:35:55 +0000 https://www.admonsters.com/?p=541673 It can’t be overstated how much of a hit in revenue publishers took in 2020. In its “Outlook for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in 2021” report, Winterberry Group estimates the decline in global ad spend at ~$39b compared to 2019. We caught up with the report's author, Bruce Biegel to learn more about Winterberry’s take on the state of Digital Media and Advertising in 2021, with a focus on the collaborative challenges that publishers face amid crumbling cookies, new regulations and emerging ID solutions.

The post What Do Smart Collaborative Data Solutions Between Pubs and Third-Party Data Providers Actually Look Like? appeared first on AdMonsters.

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It can’t be overstated how much of a hit in revenue publishers took in 2020. In its “Outlook for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in 2021” report, Winterberry Group estimates the decline in global ad spend at ~$39b compared to 2019. 

Authored by Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner at Winterberry Group, the report bluntly stares down the themes that shaped the industry in 2020 — Identity, Tech, Performance and Scale — while looking at how these trends will define the landscape over the next year. It also unpacks how organizations are managing their data to brace for regulatory impact by executing a first-party data strategy, exploring permission-based collaboration solutions with third-party data providers, and shaping a new definition of what “2nd-party data” actually means. 

In addition, Biegel co-authored a second report, Collaborative Data Solutions: The Evolution of Identity in a Privacy-First, Post-Cookie World,” which drills even deeper into what mindful, consent-first data collaboration actually looks like.

I caught up with Biegel to learn more about Winterberry’s take on the state of Digital Media and Advertising in 2021 based on both reports, with a focus on the collaborative challenges that publishers must face amid crumbling cookies, new regulations and emerging ID solutions.

Justin Joffe: In WinterBerry’s “Outlook for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in 2021” report, you forecast that, in the post-cookie landscape more brands, media owners and tech solution providers will provide permission-based collaboration solutions by partnering with each other either directly, or through trusted third parties. Can you share some examples you’re starting to see of what effective, accountable third-party partnership looks like in Europe or elsewhere? 

Bruce Biegel: From our interviews and from a discussion I did for I-COM, LiveRamp and Carrefour in France are successfully enabling partnered audiences through the Safe Haven in the U.K. publisher sector, [and] we spoke to several media owners in the video sector that are leveraging Infosum to encrypt audiences. In the U.S., all of the co-ops have been serving as trusted third parties for the hosting and analytics on transaction data including Alliant, Path2Reponse, Wiland, Abacus/Epsilon and Datalogix/ODC.    

JJ: Can publishers really trust third-party providers are working on permission-based privacy solutions that won’t affect their CPCs and other metrics? 

BB: I think that third-party providers are aligned with publishers in achieving privacy-based solutions that allow accuracy and scale with a hope of improving on the cookie ecosystem.  The balance [between] scale of audience and greater accuracy will allow brands and agencies to better predict engagement metrics – and balancing their objectives with format will ultimately lead to better managed CPMs.  

If they don’t achieve these solutions, and there is a reversion to less precision in audience targeting and inability to measure, I think we see downward pressure on metrics [where] reach will have to substitute for precision as it did in paid media pre-digital.   

JJ: What organizational adaptation have third-party data partners taken when it comes to proposing solutions for the death of cookies like new ID system alternatives to compete with what Google is proposing?

BB: There is clear focus on permission at scale and validating provenance as a first step.  The second step has been combinations of encryption and anonymization/ pseudonymization to protect the privacy of the audiences. 

Making all of this measurable on the backend is also critical. The market understands that Google’s solutions work well in a scaled Google environment, according to Google. That is unlikely to be the same case for use outside of the walled gardens.

JJ: Your evolving definition 2nd party data is interesting: “Data that is shared in a dedicated environment with a clearly defined set of permissions and rights set between each of the parties, frequently with a third-party provider managing the environment.” In that relationship, between say a publisher and an SSP, what do you envision the SSP doing to better ‘manage the environment’?

BB: I think that there is potential for the SSP to provide an environment for audience analysis between publishers, and also between brands and publishers.  The question is, what approaches they will use to go in this direction? Though I do see this as a complementary option to the buy side and to the longer tail of publishers.

JJ: Can you give us an example of what a “clean room” for collaborative data looks like in practice?

BB: Think about Safe Haven from LiveRamp, InfoSum Bunkers, Snowflake Data Exchange, Karlsgate – all of these are technology-based solutions with permissions added. The exact how each vendor works is best left for them [to speak on].

JJ: Marketing fragmentation finds retail media capturing retail ad dollars – likely contributing to that COVID-instigated ~$39b decline in ad/marketing spend as compared to 2019. Advertisers want more return on their performance marketing efforts, and your research found that they will focus their spend where products and buyers are together.

Are any of the new products that publishers have started rolling out in 2020 (like newsletters, subscriptions) able to fill some of that ROI void? If not, what else might help publishers play catch-up?

The challenge for publishers is to create content aligned with educating, informing and, where aligned, directly shoppable online.

BB: I don’t think that the retail media contributed to a decline – I see what they are doing as share shift from media companies and also from trade promotion /shopper marketing budgets – and in other cases completely new budget online to follow the consumer where they are – and they are on Amazon, Walmart, Target, CVS, etc.  

The challenge for publishers is to create content aligned with educating, informing and, where aligned, directly shoppable online. It’s not all retail/CPG, think about travel content, hospitality sites and aggregators.

JJ: As distinguished from a data-co-op, data marketplaces/exchanges seem more risky amid looming privacy regulations, even though they are permission-based. As regulations require those permissions to be spelled out, what advantages do they present from a privacy/transparency perspective that something like co-ops or technical data environments don’t?

BB: I think that the long history of data management with detailed permission around use and use cases makes co-ops less of a focus for compliance risk.  They have always had the questions on provenance and privacy so that it is not new to them.  I think that the data exchanges, depending, are more focused now on the provenance of the data in an exchange, even if their model does not allow them to view that data.  

CCPA in the US was a big push in the right direction, but it is also a focus down the value chain from the buy side through to the publishers, as no one wants to be on the wrong side of consent. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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