Your email touches every app you use, such as retail, social media, newsletters, and streaming. It holds enough information to create a profile for your consumers’ digital identity because it contains your audience’s first-party data straight from the source. 

Many see email addresses as a critical component of digital media and marketing and for the future of privacy in the industry. In lieu of third-party cookie replacement, the hashed email is a strong identifier for the consumer. Since their email touches every aspect of their digital identity, publishers and advertisers, have access to a robust data set on the consumer. 

How does it comply with privacy and data ethics? 

We spoke with Mano Pillai, Chief Product Officer, LiveIntent, to give us a deep understanding of how the hashed email can replace third-party cookies. We discussed the LiveIntent platform that targets audiences in a cookieless environment, balancing revenue and data ethics, and more. 

LiveIntent’s Email Hashing Tech

Andrew Byrd: In 2009, LiveIntent created an advertising technology platform that identifies and targets audiences in cookieless environments by replacing the cookie with a hashed email address. Can you explain how a hashed email address can replace a cookie? How does this method comply with privacy and data ethics?

Mano Pillai: A hashed email address identifies users without storing personal information, like an email address in plain text. Instead, a cryptographic hash function converts the email address into a unique fixed-length string of characters, called a hash. This hash can then be used as an identifier for the user, much like a cookie.

This method complies with privacy and data ethics by not storing personally identifiable information (PII) in a form that can be easily accessed or used for malicious purposes. The hash function is a one-way operation, meaning it is practically infeasible to reverse the process and retrieve the original email address from the hash. This helps to protect users’ privacy by making it difficult for the hashed email address to be misused.

However, it’s important to note that hashed email addresses are not a perfect solution for privacy protection. There is still a risk that bad actors could match hashes to individuals with their personal information through techniques such as rainbow tables or hash collision attacks. Using strong hashing algorithms helps mitigate those risks.

A hashed email address can be an alternative to browser cookies for user identification and addressability by serving as a unique identifier for a user without storing personal information such as their email address in plain text.

This method complies with privacy and data ethics by not storing personally identifiable information in plain text, making it difficult for the hash to be misused, and minimizing the amount of data collected from the user.

Balancing Monetization and Data Ethics

AB: Many publishers and advertisers worry privacy regulations will hinder revenue growth. Yet, Liveintent’s identity solutions propose higher CPMs for publishers and better performance for marketers. How is that so? 

MP: LiveIntent provides identity and addressability solutions powered by email, the original channel built on consent that respects a user’s preferences. LiveIntent enables publishers to better understand and monetize their audiences by connecting audience signals to anonymized email addresses. In so doing, we provide publishers with more robust and accurate datasets that help publishers inform monetization strategies.

For example, when a person subscribes to a publication, an email newsletter, or an app, they consent to provide their email address in exchange for something of value to them. With LiveIntent, publishers can extend that consent to wherever readers are paying attention and deliver added value to their readers through improved offline and online experiences and performant audience or inventory packages for the advertiser partners — all while securing higher CPMs for themselves. 

Furthermore, solutions like our prebid module help our publisher partners identify which browser a visitor uses to reach a publisher’s website, including cookie-challenged browsers like Safari and Firefox. This approach enables LiveIntent to improve publisher bid density, further improving CPMs.

Tech Breakdown

AB: To my knowledge, there are four main components to LiveIntent’s identity solutions — LiveTag, LiveConnect, the Identity Graph, and the nonID. Can you walk me through the function of each piece? 

MP: The four components of our identity solutions connect user actions across the digital landscape and their encrypted email, enabling addressability. As discussed, LiveIntent is powered by and built on email, so naturally, that’s where identity resolution and addressability capabilities commence. 

LiveIntent’s LiveTags register email actions, like opens and ad impressions, served. It places LiveTags on publisher emails, creating a privacy-compliant connection between email actions and a hashed email address. So, when a person receives a publisher’s email newsletter for which they’ve subscribed, the LiveTag will register that the email was opened by email hash “dc123456789123456789123456789123,” — we’ll call them #dc32 for short — and the ad impression served. 

Our LiveConnect tag, when placed on a publisher’s web pages, connects the email reader activity on a publisher’s digital properties to an email reader via their hashed email address. The LiveConnect tag allows publishers to drive and act on insights in real time. So, our LiveConnect tag would then register that #dc32 visited the publisher’s latest article on transatlantic sailing from the publisher’s newsletter. The publisher can use this insight to add that person to a new audience inventory package, like “outdoor enthusiasts,” for instance. 

The nonID, LiveIntent’s alternative, stable and encrypted identifier, has a one-to-one connection to LiveIntent’s Identity Graph. It connects a publisher’s first-party data to the programmatic ecosystem in real time, enabling addressability across all browsers and devices — sans third-party cookies. With the nonID, a hypothetical cruise line could target #dc32, a previous customer of theirs, on the publisher’s website, for example.

LiveIntent’s Identity Graph attributes a person’s organic interaction across devices, browsers, email alerts and newsletters, websites, and mobile apps to an encrypted email hash via the nonID. With our identity graph and LiveConnect tags in place, the publisher could identify that #dc32 also read its recent articles on composting and climate change, even if the user visited the site organically and without registering for or logging into an account. The tech allows the publisher to attach more audience signals to #dc32, enabling improved targeting and monetization. 

Because LiveIntent’s Identity Graph has an extensive scale — 900mm active hashes, 25B identifiers, 10B devices — LiveIntent can also identify anonymous traffic to the publisher’s site. It enables publishers to capitalize on every signal across their digital properties — regardless of whether or not the visitor was previously unknown or anonymous to the publisher.

How-to: Choosing the Right ID Solution

AB: There are many identity solutions that publishers can choose. How would you propose a brand choose the best identity solution for their business and prepare for third-party cookie depreciation?

MP: Choosing the right identity solution for a brand can be a complex process, and there are several factors to consider. Here are some steps a brand can take to choose the best identity solution and prepare for third-party cookie depreciation:

Assess current needs and goals, including data collection and use practices, privacy policies, and the experiences the brand wants to offer its customers.

Evaluate identity solutions, such as hashed email addresses, browser-based solutions, and alternative technologies, like Federated Identity, and decide which solution best meets their needs.

Review flexibility and ease of use, such as whether the solution enables first-party data activation across channels to drive and unlock revenue.

Consider privacy and security implications and choose a solution that protects user data and complies with relevant privacy laws and regulations.

Assess the trustworthiness of the vendors offering each solution and choose a vendor with a proven track record of protecting user data and complying with privacy laws.

Continuously monitor and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of its chosen identity solution and make adjustments as necessary to ensure you meet your goals and privacy and security standards.

Liveintent’s identity solution is interoperable, and its nonID serves as a bridge to other identifiers in the bidstream. Brands and publishers can implement Liveintent’s solution and test and optimize yield through its configurable options. For example, if a brand or publisher wants to test yield using Unified ID 2.0, LiveIntent offers a configuration option to translate the Liveintent nonID into Unified ID 2.0. Essentially, the brand or publisher only needs Liveintent to optimize yield, eliminating the need for multiple identity solutions. 

The post The Power of the Hashed Email: Mano Pillai, Chief Product Officer, LiveIntent on the Future of Privacy appeared first on AdMonsters.

Identity resolution often happens in real-time, when a person visits a website or app to enable targeting or personalization. However, identity resolution can also occur in an offline environment, such as building user journeys, where touchpoints or interactions are unified and tied to an individual for attribution.

Why Does Identity Resolution Matter?

Today’s digital landscape presents many opportunities for publishers to connect their audiences to advertising partners. Yet the fragmented and expansive nature adds difficulty to identifying and understanding audiences, interactions, and potential monetization opportunities. 

Consider, for instance, that in the US alone, household residents have access to an average of 10.37 connected devices, 75% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, and 52% always expect personalized offers. To further complicate matters, only 20% of audiences log into their accounts, hampering first-party data collection that enables consistent and personalized interactions between audiences, publishers, and advertisers that drive monetization. 

Despite these realities, however, identity resolution allows publishers to collect and connect audience interactions across offline and online platforms, channels, and devices to a single person or audience profile via unique identifiers. By unifying interactions and attributing them to an individual, publishers can create a single customer view or a unique customer profile that contains demographic attributes and interest and preference-based data — valuable information that enables targeting and publisher monetization. And, as the world prepares to potentially bid third-party cookies ‘adieu,’ identity resolution solutions will allow publishers to solve addressability issues, enabling monetization even in a cookieless world.

Identity Resolution’s Role in a Post-third-party-cookie World

Historically, third-party cookies were the standard for identifying users on the web, but with the threat of third-party cookie deprecation upon us, the industry must consider alternative identifiers to achieve addressability or risk significant revenue loss. 

Just how significant?

In 2019 Google ran a randomized experiment over three months for the top 500 global publishers, testing what would happen if third-party cookies were disabled. The results were staggering, as average revenue for those in the treatment group decreased by 52%.

While a future without third-party cookies appears bleak (not to mention the changing landscape of mobile Advertising IDs), identity resolution presents a promising alternative to enhance first-party data. With the right identity resolution solution, publishers can mitigate revenue loss once Google deprecates third-party cookies, deliver higher engagement rates for their advertisers, and drive higher CPMs for themselves. 

How Does Identity Resolution Work, and How Does It Help Pubs?

Identity resolution is made possible with an identity graph, an online database that stores identifiers tied to individuals across online and offline channels and properties. These identifiers are matched to individuals using either probabilistic or deterministic matching, or a hybrid of both. Identity graphs provide publishers with real-time data, equipping them with a comprehensive, unified, and up-to-date view of their audiences at all times.

Identity resolution for yield optimization
Using identity resolution to create a unified customer view across properties, publishers can offer advertisers extensive targeting options based on robust first-party audience data and improve yield.

Say, for instance, that a large media company, we’ll call it Spade, owns several small publications covering health & fitness, travel & leisure, and fashion & culture. Spade uses identity resolution to better understand its visitors across its entire media portfolio — their engagement, interests, preferences, and behaviors. With this intelligence, Spade can build monetization strategies that enable its advertiser partners to achieve greater reach and frequency, enabling targeting across all of its available inventory.

Spade could create an audience package of visitors between the ages of 24-30 that have viewed cruise ship content on its travel & leisure site. Using identity resolution and a unified customer view, Spade can scale its audience packages by identifying many of those same visitors, whether logged in or not, on its health & fitness and fashion & culture sites. 

Spade could also use identity resolution to increase yield. By using a solution capable of translating its first-party IDs into other IDs on which buyers transact, like the nonID or UID 2.0, the publisher can drive more competitive bids for their inventory. 

Identity resolution for marketing and improved CX

Publishers can take a similar approach to promote, cross and upsell their products, drive additional revenue by marketing paid subscriptions, or patch holes in leaky paywalls.

Say Spade wanted to ensure that only paying subscribers access its content and instituted a two-article maximum, or cap, for nonsubscribers. With identity resolution, Spade can discern between non-logged-in subscribers and visitors who are not subscribers and, therefore, not logged in. Spade could then provide a popup inviting nonsubscribers to subscribe for unlimited content and drive revenue. In the case of non-logged-in subscribers, Spade can instead provide a popup that asks the subscriber to log in to continue enjoying the benefits of their subscription.

With identity resolution, publishers can drive incremental revenue, improve customer experiences at scale, and mitigate revenue loss today and in a cookieless future.

The post What Is Identity Resolution, And How Does It Impact Publishers? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Organizations are pivoting to first-party data strategies to drive monetization, deliver personalization, and improve customer experience in order to control their destiny. While these circumstances present obstacles for most of the industry, publishers have an advantage given their wealth of first-party data.

To maintain their edge, publishers must unify data strewn across a fragmented digital landscape that spans properties, channels, platforms, and devices. With disruption on the horizon, it behooves publishers to act now and prioritize first-party data unification. 

Why Unify First-party Data?

First-party data unification enables publishers to connect disparate data points, like interest and behavioral-based data, and tie them to individual users via unique identifiers, like HEMs or alternative IDs, to create a unified audience view. 

This comprehensive view enables publishers to monetize audiences, content, and offerings more effectively and efficiently via distinctive audience packages, highly personalized messaging, and improved online and offline experiences. 

Furthermore, data is only valuable if it is accurate. By collecting, unifying, and storing data in a centralized platform, publishers can more easily organize, cleanse, and update information, ensuring audience profiles evolve with their audiences. The more accurate the audience data, the more valuable the audience and inventory. 

Gain Control of First-party Data With a Unified Audience 

By partnering with identity providers that put audiences and their privacy at the center of their solutions, publishers can unify, grow, and activate their first-party data, ultimately securing their futures.

To do so successfully, publishers must ensure that interactions between them and those of all their audiences — known (logged-in) and unknown (non-logged-in) — are captured and resolved against their CRM database. According to the IAB’s State of Data 2022 report, organizations prioritize capturing known first-party audience data over unknown first-party audiences. This is a missed opportunity, as most publishers’ audiences (~80%) are unknown. 

Solutions like LiveIntent’s Site Visitor Resolution (SVR) can help publishers easily identify non-logged-in and logged-in site visitors to build and activate a truly robust first-party asset. This, coupled with first-party data unification efforts, enables publishers to take control of their data, how it is enriched, segmented, and activated. 

First-party data unification gives publishers the opportunity to grow their business exponentially, with a deep understanding of audience preferences, interests, needs, and behaviors, further solidifying their foothold in the industry regardless of the disruption that may come their way.

The post The Imperative for First-party Data Unification appeared first on AdMonsters.

 Direct-sold deals will be a salve for publishers in the interim between today and the complete deprecation of third-party cookies. Direct-sold deals are an ideal alternative because they’re based on a publisher’s first-party data and enable targeting and measurement across the entire customer journey.

 The need for addressable and performant audiences is paramount for advertisers. According to a study conducted by LiveIntent and Advertiser Perceptions, advertisers vet publishers for the quality of their content (56%) and first-party data (51%) to deliver performance. This is amplified in the absence of third-party cookies today with Firefox and Safari and will be uniform once the final Google Chrome shoe drops.

Publishers have obviously earned their first-party relationships with their customers, but how can they best capitalize on this shift away from third-party and towards first-party data? The answer lies with email. 

Email newsletters and alerts present an opportunity to build and leverage a publisher’s owned and operated media, first-party data, and addressable logged-in audiences to provide greater value to advertisers by connecting them with the audiences they want to reach.

The Challenges of Building Direct-sold Programs

While direct-sold programs are a valuable component of a monetization strategy, there are important first-party data considerations to ensure publishers can reap the benefits.  

Although publishers have had years to accumulate first-party data, many are still lagging and don’t have their coffers full. According to the IAB State of Data report, 33% of publishers are concerned about having enough first-party data, and 55% are currently unable to offer extended reach through first-party data matching to their advertisers.

And even if publishers can get their hands on invaluable first-party data, many publishers are unsure how to best package the data into advertiser offerings. Direct-sold programs highlight the overlapping value of a publisher’s audience and content, but there’s uncertainty around which formats, rates, and metrics make the most sense. 

Rachel Rubin, Vice President of Customer Success, at LiveIntent, partners with publishers on successfully packaging their inventory. 

“We find that most publishers are familiar with how to package up their web inventory, but when it comes to newsletter inventory, it tends to be a ‘let’s see what works approach.’ That’s because the impression-based selling that is typically done for web properties doesn’t directly translate to newsletters which are usually based on sponsorships. Unfortunately, it’s a missed opportunity since the email newsletter represents the most performant of inventory and allows for unmatched targeting and measurement across a publisher’s other properties.”  

Publishers that continue to sell newsletter advertising inventory on an impression-only model will face difficulties from Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). They can no longer collect data on email opens or exact geolocations from those using Apple’s email client. However, publishers who decide to sell newsletter inventory in an MPP-adjusted environment can thrive with targeting that leverages first-party data around interests, needs, and desires or by structuring direct-sold deals based on different audience engagement metrics, such as email clicks versus opens.

Email Newsletters May Be a Publisher’s Solution

Let’s say a publisher has a prospective advertiser that sells outdoor recreational equipment. The publisher can leverage its first-party data to create a direct-sold deal for the advertiser that extends to the publisher’s email properties, focusing on audiences who’ve engaged with relevant content on its website and newsletters like health, sports, and environmentalism, for instance.  

The added bonus is that the publisher can provide performant audiences to the advertisers in a logged-in environment that the publisher owns and gain additional revenue. And marketers are catching on, with 9 in 10 seeing newsletters as a valuable way to reach, target, and personalize communication. 

“For publishers struggling to meet the demands of impression opportunities, email can be a natural extension through direct-sold,” explains Rubin. “Email offers advertisers premium inventory because publishers can guarantee precision targeting and attribution based on an email address. Advertisers love the logged-in nature of email because it’s similar to other logged-in environments like Facebook or YouTube. Publishers can charge a premium because advertisers get access to a logged-in, cross-device, performant, and measurable audience that advertisers value.”

Concurrently, as publishers continue to try to build up their troves of first-party data, a successful and robust email program allows them to build up that first-party data set. It’s valuable today and the fulcrum of identity in the post-third-party cookie era. 

Unlock Speed and Efficiency for Direct-sold Programs

One of the reasons that native ad formats have been so valuable to advertisers is that they have a custom look and feel that blends seamlessly into a publisher’s web content. But when it comes to native ads in email, publishers have been hindered by a heavily manual implementation and activation process.

Rubin shared how she has seen these issues resolved with LiveIntent’s client Dotdash Meredith. The organization was expanding its email inventory mix to include native ads but needed a turnkey solution to avoid having to manually hardcode an ad into its email newsletter template.  

LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints enabled publishers like Dotdash Meredith to streamline and automate the placing of native display units within email newsletters. 

“The solution provides speed and efficiency when combined with a direct-sold strategy because Native Ad Blueprints allows publishers to gain greater control over their inventory while not slowing them down with manual processes like in the days of yore,” says Rubin.

Launching solutions such as LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, allows publishers to lean into direct-sold advertising and capitalize on their hard-won audiences. Because, as we have seen, it is not enough to possess first-party data, publishers must monetize the data to be successful in the cookieless future.

The post Why Direct-sold Programs Are a Publisher’s Answer to First-party Data Challenges appeared first on AdMonsters.

Just last year, Liveintent found that 87% of publishers and marketers were actively investing in email and 94% were prioritizing scaling their email programs. 

Truth is, publishers have been deploying email newsletters as audience generation tools for their O&O properties for eons. So email is not some brand new shiny thing, but it has mostly played a value-added background role in publishers’ revenue strategies. 

This recent surge can be attributed to all sorts of things from the cookie crackdown to looming privacy regulations to publishers needing to diversify their revenue. I spoke with Rachel Rubin, Vice President, Customer Success, Liveintent to dive deeper into these topics and especially focus on how email newsletters can come out of the shadows to play a leading role in a publisher’s direct-sold program. 

You can watch or listen to the full conversation, or just check out this edited version below.

Email Newsletters Are the New Homepage

Lynne d Johnson: Interest in newsletters is surging. It’s been said that email newsletters are the new homepage for digital publishers, and quite a few large-scale pubs seem to be doubling down on the channel. Is this more than just a trend?

Rachel Rubin: Publishers and marketers have been using newsletters to engage with their readers and their customers for well over a decade now. 

With that said, the focus on newsletters definitely surged over the pandemic. Over the last two years, we’ve seen that email marketing engagement rose by 200%. And the best part is that new readers who started reading newsletters at the beginning of the pandemic are staying in the inbox. 

This spike helped more companies see the value of newsletters as a trusted channel for building and engaging with their audience. Users are opting in, raising their hands, and saying, “Yes, I want content from this publisher — from this marketer.” It’s a really engaged audience. 

Another main driver is email’s growing role as a means of collecting first-party data, which is so important right now. But for the email environment to remain a viable solution, publishers and brands need to continue to provide value to their newsletter readers and be transparent about the value exchange. Email is here to stay. And it’s really exciting to see that everyone is understanding the value now.

Direct-Sold Makes a Comeback

LdJ: We’ve also heard that direct sales are back in style, and PMPs and PGs are trending. What is LiveIntent’s thinking on this?

RR: With the death of the third-party cookie, the future of targeting is kind of in limbo and direct sales are gaining serious momentum regardless of what pipes the execution is coming from. 

LiveIntent is integrated with all the external DSPs — DV 360, The Trade Desk, you name it. We also have a managed service for executing direct deals. And we see priority PMPs coming up more in the environment. We don’t yet have the capabilities for PGs, because, unlike the web which is constant, email has ebbs and flows 

At the end of the day, advertisers want to reach their relevant audience, and publishers who engage with readers on a daily basis know these audiences better than anyone. Publishers who can articulate what makes their audiences and content unique — they’ve really branded and conquested that market. 

Email is a unique snowflake because we don’t rely on cookies, we rely on email hashes. That makes it easier for advertisers or publishers to target their own first-party data.

Increasing Yield With Native Ads in Email

LdJ: In the past, pubs didn’t focus on email because they felt it was too much work. But with your product Native Ad Blueprints, they can build a scalable premium ad experience with little effort and increase the yield of their direct-sold program. Is that correct?

RR: LiveIntent has made newsletters easy. Historically, if you wanted to do native in newsletters, that took a lot of time and bandwidth because you needed someone coding HTML every single time you wanted to switch out your ads.

We’re making that easier without the operational drag of hard coding every single campaign. Publishers can add native ads to their media kit and increase their yield by directly selling native.

And since native ads are designed to look and feel like newsletter content — they drive higher engagement, helping advertisers build brand equity. So they’re a win-win all around. Advertisers get higher CTRs and more performance, and publishers can justify more premium CPMs.

We’ve also recently brought Native Curated Packages to market. This is our version of native demand for publishers. We want to give publishers the control to pick and choose which advertisers run natively in their email newsletters.

Creating New Products and Bringing on New Advertisers

LdJ: In the future, it looks like there won’t be just one thing to replace third-party cookies. Besides being able to collect and activate first-party data, what are some of the other benefits for pubs?

RR:  Pubs can use their newsletter content and ad engagement data to build audiences to segment out audiences by interests — like sports fans, health and wellness enthusiasts, or finance enthusiasts, for example.

Newsletter content and ad engagement data can also lend insight into reader behavior. By examining metrics, you can glean which readers are taking action and then segment those users. You can also create first-party data right in the email environment. 

Tying this all back to your direct-sold and direct-deal question from earlier; this approach helps publishers bring on new advertisers. And they’re able to do that by showcasing their unique offering — captivating content and highly engaged audiences.

Leveraging CRM Data to Increase Reach

LdJ: What about the convergence of martech and adtech — taking first-party data out of silos? How can pubs leverage their CRM data to increase their reach with email newsletters? 

RR: Publishers can utilize CRM data in the email newsletter to target new subscribers, suppress subscribers, target content clickers, or utilize it for marketing campaigns right across the email channel. This is not just within their owned and operated email, but extending their CRM data to target the exchange of emails we have.

Also, leveraging CRM data is not all about targeting. It’s also about suppression. When you are targeting users, it does limit your reach. With suppression, it’s the opposite. You know, who you don’t want to target. 

MPP Isn’t Really Hurting Revenue

LdJ: What about Apple’s privacy changes in the inbox. Is this scary for publishers?

RR: This is something else that requires education. Before MPP launched, we researched and became really educated about it so that we could educate our publishers and ensure they understand what it means for their email newsletters and especially for their metrics. 

We’re not seeing revenue decline, we’re just seeing that the metrics we once loved and held on to are not so accurate anymore. So now we’re in a period of transition and working hard to come up with adjusted metrics so that our publishers and our advertisers can still understand their newsletter performance outside of just the revenue metric. 

Top 3 Takeaways: Direct-Sold in Email Newsletters

LdJ: We’ve touched on so many fascinating topics here. What are your top three takeaways that you want publishers to know about direct-sold in email newsletters?

RR: One, it’s a really easy channel to utilize your first-party data. Two, it’s a really easy channel to create first-party data and create the proper segments to use within your email environment, but also extend it to all of your other channels. And then third, leaning into native can only help increase your yield from both a programmatic and direct-sold standpoint.

The post Unlock Direct-Sold Revenue With Email Newsletters and Native Ads: Q&A With LiveIntent’s Rachel Rubin appeared first on AdMonsters.

AdMonsters webinars are available on-demand, so you can view them any time, on your own schedule. 2021 webinars covered the most pressing issues facing the digital media and advertising industry, from developing a scalable first-party data strategy to identity solutions and cookie replacements to OTT and CTV privacy controls to maximizing revenue in email plus more.

Give yourself a professional edge, tune into an AdMonsters Webinar On-Demand Now! Or, maybe later.

OTT & CTV Privacy Controls: Activating Choice & Transparency in Apps

The shift to OTT and CTV creates an opportunity for publishers to engage a growing audience and deliver personalized experiences – and that includes privacy controls. Tegna is on the path to providing that transparency and choice with their OTT audience. In this webinar, Chris Fehrmann, Tegna VP of Digital Products, and Alex Cash, OneTrust Consent and Preference Management Lead talked about how your team can deliver personalization, and build trust within your streaming app. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display

As alternative ways to distribute social content become increasingly important, publishers are offering solutions to help brands take their social creative and run it across publisher inventory with Social Display. Celtra Senior Product Marketing Manager Nikki Gartner discussed how to apply creative effects to Social Display and showcase new workflows that allow even non-designers across account and sales teams to build and activate Social Display with no coding or design experience. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to turn Social Display content into a premium ad experience. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Top Publishers are Using VRM to Prep for UIDs, FLoCs and Revenue in a Cookieless Future

With all the uncertainty about the cookieless future, as a publisher, there’s really only one way to future-proof your business: grow relationships with your visitors. There is no single “silver bullet” technology — whether it’s Universal IDs, FLoCs or subscriptions — that will save publisher revenue and jobs in a post-cookie world. Join Dan Rua, CEO, Admiral, as he speaks with Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech, Arvid Tchivzhel, GM Digital, Mather Economics, Kevin Cooper, SVP, Digital, Boone Newspapers, and Derek Nicol, VP, Advertising Technologies, ViacomCBS about two visitor-first publisher efforts that should be your primary focus right now, in preparation for the uncertainty of 2022. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Identity is a Team Sport: How Publishers & Marketers Can Move Beyond the Cookie Together

How are marketers and publishers preparing for a post-cookie world? Lotame commissioned a survey of over 1,000 marketers and publishers across the globe to find out. In this webinar, Alexandra Theriault, Lotame’s Chief Customer Officer, presented key survey findings from “Beyond the Cookie: The Future of Advertising for Marketers & Publishers” to set a baseline for our live case study discussion. Alexandra was joined by Advance Local and Rush Street to walk through how they’re actively implementing and testing identity solutions, and what they’ve learned along the way. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Personalization & Privacy: Your Third-Party Cookie Replacement Game Plan

Chrome’s delayed cookie deprecation may bring a sigh of relief, but other browsers like Safari and Firefox already implemented blocking third-party tracking cookies, further emphasizing that it’s never too early to start planning for when third-party cookies are totally gone. It’s important to understand how the deprecation of third-party cookies could impact your website. This way, you can make the necessary changes before third-party cookies phase out completely. In this webinar Arshdeep Sood, Solutions Engineer at OneTrust, explains why it’s important to ensure that you have a CMP in place to adhere to regulatory guidelines now — while cookies are still around. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences in Email

By leveraging your first-party audience data, you can build a scalable ad sales program around premium ad packages. Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved. Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, Liveintent, and Bobby Bonett, VP Digital, Sandow explain how you can use Liveintent’s Native Ad Blueprints in your email newsletter program to improve operational efficiency, improve ad experiences, increase revenue and engagement. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World

The need for first-party data is creating a shift in power towards publishers. Why? Because publishers have a direct relationship with their readers, giving them access to unique insights about audiences that advertisers crave. In this webinar, Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, AdMonsters, converses with Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker & Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, as they dive into the goldmine that is publishers’ first-party data and why it’s so powerful. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

The post AdMonsters 2021 Webinar Replay Roundup appeared first on AdMonsters.

On September 20th, 2021, Apple released iOS 15, an operating system update introducing three new privacy features to Apple devices: Hide my Email, Private Relay, and Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). This update, and these features, in particular, alter how and what data publishers (and third parties) can collect. While Apple’s iOS 15 update may have the most significant impact on publishers and advertisers yet, it’s not the first time Apple’s updates rattle the industry.

The Evolution of Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention

In 2017, Apple rolled out Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) for its Safari web browser. The feature, set as a default standard by Apple, prevents cookie-based tracking across websites. Furthermore, Apple’s ITP prevents companies from using fingerprinting to create probabilistic connections and device profiles for their identity graphs. However, it’s worth noting that while ITP blocks third-party cookie tracking, it does not block first-party cookies from providing essential functionalities on a website, like storing your login information.

Apple’s ITP 2.0 limited advertisers’ ability to store third-party cookies as first-party cookies to get around tracking prevention features. In its latest form, ITP 2.2 uses machine learning on the user’s device to identify the domains with which an Apple device user directly interacts. All client-side cookies are blocked after 24 hours if the users visit a site from a cross-site link, like the redirect URLs commonly used in digital advertising.

Per Apple: “Unless you visit and interact with the third-party content provider as a first-party website, their cookies and website data are deleted.” This is why it’s vital that publishers encourage engagement amongst site visitors. Creating interactive website experiences — rather than simply driving visitors to landing pages where they browse and drop in less than a minute — is critical in today’s world. Publishers who implement interactive tactics on their properties are better positioned to gather valuable data. 

With the release of Apple iOS 15, there’s more red tape around how publishers and advertisers can reach and connect with audiences. Below, we decode how some of the latest features of iOS 15 impact publishers and how they can adapt. 

Hide My Email

What is it?

Hide My Email enables an Apple iCloud+ subscriber to create a one-off email address to fill out forms, log in to websites, and sign up for newsletters without revealing their actual email addresses. The one-off email address created is usable only by the specific app or website for which the user created it. Any email sent to that address is redirected to the personal email account designated by the user.

What does it mean for publishers?

This puts a damper on building subscriber lists as those using Hide My Email will sign up with a “throwaway” email. However, Hide My Email is not available to all Apple mobile users. Only iCloud+ paid account holders using Safari can use Hide My Email in a web form. The good news? Currently, a little less than 20 percent of people worldwide use Safari.

Private Relay

What is it?

Say a person using their Apple device opens their browser and visits a website. With Private Relay, the information about web traffic from that user’s device is encrypted, leaving third parties unable to read or access traffic signals, such as IP addresses, between the user and the website — including Apple and the user’s network provider. Instead, the user’s DNS requests go through two separate internet relays. The first relay assigns an anonymous IP address, which generalizes the user’s location and maps their anonymized IP address to a general region instead of a specific location. The second relay decrypts the web address the user means to visit and connects them to the site. 

What does it mean for publishers?

Because Private relay encrypts an Apple user’s IP addresses, publishers will no longer have insight into traffic coming from specific locations but only state-wide or regional insights. These limited insights mean that publishers now have less granularity when it comes to geo-targeting efforts.

But what about traffic coming from email? Enter Mail Privacy Protection. 

Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)

What is it?

Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) applies specifically to the use of the native Mail app on Apple devices. MPP blocks invisible pixels in emails from collecting information about the email recipient. With MPP, email senders can no longer collect data on email opens or exact geolocations. MPP masks an email recipient’s IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their locations. Additionally, MPP automatically loads email content after delivery, making it impossible for publishers to know when subscribers are opening their emails or if they are truly opening them.

What does it mean for publishers?

According to Litmus, 46.3 percent of all emails were opened in the Apple Mail app on the iPhone, iPad, and Macs. However, whether those emails are actually opened in the Apple Mail app doesn’t matter. If one of your subscribers is accessing their Gmail account using the Mail app on their phone, then any time that Gmail account receives an email from you, Apple will signal it was opened.

With MPP inflating email open rates, publishers need to reassess how they create audience segments, deliver personalized content, and analyze the performance of their email programs. Email open rates are not the only metrics impacted by MPP, however. If you’re a publisher that monetizes email newsletters, the inflated impression rates affect how CPM and CTR are calculated. However, this doesn’t mean your overall revenue is impacted.

Engagement Data: A publisher’s North Star

These privacy changes don’t mean publishers need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Although open rates are now inflated, geolocation data is generalized, and email addresses may be “hidden,” there’s still plenty publishers can do to manage successful email newsletter programs. By focusing on metrics that speak to engagement and tweaking email strategies, publishers can uncover audiences that are most connected to their brand and content, and adapt. Below are steps you can take to hone in on engagement. 

Create an Apple Mail vs. non-Apple Mail list.

By segmenting your list in this way, you can gain insight into how email is performing amongst those who don’t use the Apple Mail app. You can use the non-Apple segment as a proxy for understanding open rate performance.

Focus on clicks instead of opens and other lower-funnel metrics.

Publishers may wish to suppress or remove unengaged audiences from their targeting or email messaging. Accurately identifying engaged audiences will be difficult in a world with MPP if engagement is defined by email opens. Instead of focusing on email opens, look at email clicks to understand which audiences are engaged and what is driving engagement. This provides insights that are further down the funnel and speaks to interests and preferences, which can also help inform your email and content strategy. 

Reassess email activities that rely on opens.

Take stock of your email campaigns and reassess how to evolve those activities to suit today’s changing landscape. For instance, reaching audiences who use the Apple Mail app in a specific suburb of Long Island, NY, isn’t feasible with the new update, so adjustments must be made to address audiences accordingly. A/B testing subject lines is another example of the types of email activities publishers will need to reconsider in a world where open rates are affected. 

Broaden your use of metrics.

If you take care to curate an experience entirely within your newsletter, adding more places to encourage clicks out of your email may not work. Instead, look at incorporating other metrics that indicate engagement, such as subscribing to additional newsletters, upgrading to a paid digital subscription, or time spent with content published on your website or mobile app. Linking these engagements to your subscribers will require you to work with an identity partner, like LiveIntent, who can help you connect activity across channels to a subscriber address.

The post What Does Apple’s iOS 15 Update Mean for Publishers? appeared first on AdMonsters.

But how about the fact that email newsletters offer pubs a solid additional revenue stream, especially as the cookie crumbles and CPMs are expected to dwindle?

That’s right, pubs. Imagine building a scalable direct-sold program around premium ad packages that resonate with your audience while driving deeper engagement for buyers. Well, publishers like SANDOW Media are using LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints to combine native advertising and email newsletters to do exactly that. But that’s not all.

In a recent AdMonsters webinar with LiveIntent, How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW shared how SANDOW streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization, and most importantly how they’re realizing 15X greater CTR than with display ads. 

According to eMarketer native advertising is expected to reach $57.27 billion this year, and with recent technological advancements, native programmatic advertising in email is proving to be both efficient and effective, contributing significantly to publishers’ programmatic revenue. 

Native ads in email no longer require hard coding and they can also be served dynamically, opening up the revenue floodgates and delivering a seamless and personalized user experience. Native programmatic ads in email can be just as engaging as a publisher’s newsletter content, if not more so. 

“The format garners 53% more engagement than display ads,” explained Jessica Muñoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent. That’s a huge opportunity that publishers just can’t ignore.

LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints can help publishers streamline their workflows to support adding premium ad inventory to their email newsletters.

Case Study: SANDOW Media’s Metropolis Magazine Customizable Ad Formats 

Metropolis Magazine partnered with LiveIntent to create a Native Ad Blueprint designed to promote sponsored content in their newsletter, allowing them to escape from display ads being their primary source of revenue for this channel.

“What’s really important to our clients is not a monumental impression share, it’s contextualization alongside premium content,” said Bonett. “And the best way we feel to contextualize an advertiser next to our premium content is elevating them to the level of our content and have that ad content blend in natively.”

Selling advertisers on the concept of their ads blending in with premium content was the easy part for SANDOW. What was tricky was selling it on the operational side. The publisher wanted their small but mighty ad ops team, across their various media brands dealing with 100s of opportunities per week, to: 

• easily traffic approvals
• stand up campaigns
• edit ads on the fly without the assistance of a web editor 
• and manage an inventory efficiently

“Being able to do all of this from a programmatic sense with the LiveIntent backend allows us to be more efficient with our time and allows that team to operate in a much more seamless way without involving unnecessary intermediaries along the way,” shared Bonett.

As well, being able to deploy reader-relevant ad units like these on time, twice per week, with approval from the client is hypercritical to the campaign’s success and high performance. This allows a publisher like SANDOW to run more campaigns more efficiently.

Personalization Wins Every Time

According to data from a recent Advertising Perceptions survey, in partnership with LiveIntent, advertisers say the quality of a publisher’s content and the quality of their first-party data are the most important criteria they use when deciding which ones they choose to partner with for sponsorships. 

“They want to know that you’re putting the same care into getting their messages in front of your readers as you do with your own content,” said Muñoz. “LiveIntent can help you tap into that personalization.”

This is precisely how SANDOW Media increased revenue and CTRs with premium ad experiences in email.

“Protecting the sanctity of the native ad content and its quality is important,” said Bonet. “If you’re backfilling with low-quality ad content readers are going to start filtering you out and it could also change their perception of your editorial content. By prioritizing relevant advertising content we have newsletters where the top-performing content is the native ad unit. You’ll never get that from a banner ad in a million years.”

Besides, don’t you want to sell beyond your current guaranteed deals and be able to run multiple campaigns with multiple sponsors and serve the right ad to the right reader at the right time?

As you should all well know, dynamic ad serving in email is not possible if you’re hard coding your ads. But compared to traditional static ad units, Native Ad Blueprints allows pubs to run simultaneous native campaigns with options to apply targeting parameters (such as locale, date, and time), as well as first-party data to fill impressions and boost yield. 

And because Native Ad Blueprints can be used across multiple ad slots, publishers can scale their native ad inventory into additional newsletters if warranted. This technology is zooming publishers’ newsletter revenue strategies light-years beyond those guaranteed deals they’re currently selling.

Sounds like a win for publishers, their advertising partners, and their readers as well. With Native Ad Blueprints publishers no longer have to worry about limited resources holding them back from providing advertisers with customizations or negatively impacting the user experience with irrelevant native ads. Talk about balancing ad quality with ad revenue. 

Below you can check out the full webinar:

The post How SANDOW Media Increased Revenue and CTRs With Premium Ad Experiences in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

In fact, eMarketer predicts spend for native advertising to reach $57.27 billion this year.

But leveraging native ads for monetizing email newsletters isn’t as easy as it is on the web. And in case you haven’t heard, email newsletters are booming. So it’s a good thing that with technological advancements, native programmatic advertising in email is proving to be efficient and effective, contributing significantly to publishers’ programmatic revenue.

Publishers like SANDOW Media are using LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints to leverage their first-party audience data to build a scalable ad sales program around premium ad packages that resonate with their audiences while driving deeper buyer engagement by combining native formats for email newsletters and programmatic advertising.

Check out this video from our recent webinar — How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email — with Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent and Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW.

• How SANDOW streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization
• How SANDOW is seeing better CTRs than with display ads
• How Native Ad Blueprints helps pubs improve operational efficiency
• How Native Ad Blueprints helps pubs increase revenue and engagement
• How to employ robust targeting to easily execute multiple direct campaigns simultaneously
• How native programmatic ads can be just as engaging as content, and even more so

The post Build a Scalable Ad Sales Program Around Premium Ads in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved.

In preparation for our webinar: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021, @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!) — featuring Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent and Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW — we spoke with Nick Bolt, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Publisher Solutions, LiveIntent, about how native ads can help publishers grow their business and revenue, as well as how they can significantly streamline their workflows and gain back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options.

Lynne d Johnson: Native advertising is one of the fastest-growing areas of digital display when it comes to ad spend. I think eMarketer is predicting native will account for $57.27 billion of display spend this year. But a lot of that money is going to the walled gardens, primarily social networks. What other opportunities do publishers have to cash in on this native advertising surge?

Nick Bolt: While there are plenty of native opportunities publishers can tap into on the web, email poses a valuable option for publishers. Native ads garner high engagement rates for advertisers, and in turn, high CPMs for publishers — which only increase in the opt-in environment of email.

Native ads also enable publishers to diversify their media kit with premium ad units that elevate digital experiences. Furthermore, with native ads in email newsletters, publishers can transform their newsletters into a channel for first-party data collection. With more premium options publishers can attract a larger array of advertisers and acquire more data to continue growing their business and revenue. 

Lynne d Johnson: Native in email sounds great, but how can publishers capitalize on native ads without undercutting the work they’ve put into cultivating their display inventory options? 

Nick Bolt: Native ads and banner ads both play an integral part in monetization and advertising strategies. While native ads may garner higher engagement rates for advertisers, they’re designed to fit the look and feel of the publisher’s branding; an advertiser may prefer an ad unit that provides them with the opportunity to showcase their branding and logos instead, as is the case in brand awareness campaigns. The key is to have one’s native and display inventory work together as a multi-format buy where advertisers can purchase both types of inventory for a full newsletter sponsorship. 

Lynne d Johnson: One of the many benefits of native ads in email is that publishers get to use data to make advertising extremely relevant for readers, which of course is a win-win for buyers. What are some of the other benefits?

Nick Bolt: With native ads in email, but more specifically LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, publishers gain more control and greater flexibility. Native ads enable publishers to monetize their email newsletters while maintaining their brand identity. As publishers work to increase their subscription and retention efforts, native ads are a valuable way to improve subscription experiences with highly-curated, premium ad units powered by reader behavior and interest data. 

Lynne d Johnson: Besides monetization opportunities, what are some of the publisher benefits of using native ads in email newsletters?

NB: With Native Ad Blueprints, publishers can go beyond guaranteed deals committed to a single advertiser and instead can run multiple deals across several advertisers that serve the most relevant ad to readers. Publishers and their ad ops teams can do this while significantly streamlining their workflows and gaining back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options. Furthermore, our Native Ad Blueprints solution enables publishers to leverage their email newsletter inventory for their own marketing needs, targeting their audiences with ads that will help them achieve their own marketing goals and objectives.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free webinar with LiveIntent: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021 @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!)

The post Pubs Are Increasing Revenue and First-party Data Collection With Native Ads in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.