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Third-party cookies will be disappearing entirely next year – and it’s just one of several updates to identity and data privacy the digital advertising industry is experiencing. There has been an influx of regulations, frameworks, and solutions, leading ad buyers and sellers down a path of uncertainty and confusion.
This period of monumental change has been driven in a large part by the increasing consumer concern about how their data is used, and the control that they have over it. As a result, advertisers and publishers are having to totally rethink the way they continue to deliver relevant content to audiences, while ensuring any routes they take help to rebuild and maintain consumer trust. And the key to being able to do that lies in greater alignment and collaboration across the industry.
Along these lines, LiveRamp recently collaborated with Amobee, Neustar, and Pubmatic, in association with The Project X Institute, to launch the European Addressable Media Initiative. The aim of the initiative is to collaborate across the media and advertising ecosystem to support European advertisers, agencies, and media owners in understanding the current landscape around addressable media.
So, why is it so important that we work together?
Scaling the walls
For many years, walled gardens, such as Google and Facebook, have excelled at offering the ability for advertisers to reach consumers with personalized advertising, thanks to the vast amount of data they have at their disposal. And this is why many advertisers perceive these logged-in environments to be the most effective way to reach people. In fact, 69% of ad spend currently gets pumped into these walled gardens.
The problem with so much ad spend running into this closed ecosystem is that consumers actually tend to split their time more-or-less equally between walled gardens and the open internet. So, there is a significant opportunity that advertisers are missing out on by not having a more balanced approach to their media investment, upping it into publishers across the open internet. And it’s time to redress the balance together.
The combined efforts of the stakeholders are what will drive value on the open web. By relying more on authenticated first-party data, publishers are able to build stronger relationships with consumers and brands, as well as to enable people-based marketing. By leveraging data and relationships, advertisers can deliver more relevant and effective campaigns, improving relationships with consumers, and powering a better experience. By collaborating, these stakeholders can make the open web a comparable destination for ad spend to the walled gardens.
Furthermore, as addressability improves, brands will be able to increase their investment in the open web, which will in turn better support publishers creating great content. Having both brands’ and publishers’ contributions here will help lead to the emergence of a sustainable ad-funded open web.
Authentic connections
As brands and publishers chase quality relationships with consumers to drive value and authentications, there’s one other area where collaboration helps push the ecosystem forward.
As publishers and brands begin transacting on people-based identifiers, both publishers and brands will benefit from the measurement and visibility that these enable. In addition to helping to power addressability, people-based identifiers give publishers and brands visibility into performance across all platforms, enabling a cross-platform people-based approach – a necessity in today’s market. Furthermore, people-based marketing streamlines measurement, helping publishers to get the credit they deserve, while increasing yield on unidentifiable impressions, and also giving brands the ability to better understand how their campaigns are performing, and how to shape more effective campaigns in the future.
Addressing the future
Authenticated first-party data being collected to create addressable media helps to rebuild consumer trust, putting control into the hands of the consumer and the publisher. It also creates an environment where advertisers and publishers can work more in unison to deliver meaningful outcomes for brands. The latter is imperative, not just for the continued success of advertisers and publishers, but for ensuring that the open ecosystem is one that puts consumer privacy first, is fair, and remains competitive – unlike the walled gardens.
The deprecation of third-party cookies, the increasing number of privacy regulations, and the rising importance of authenticated first-party data, has presented the media industry with an opportunity to build an improved digital advertising ecosystem that leverages privacy-first identity and addressability to deliver what consumers, brands, and publishers are looking for. But the only way for this to be a true success is if the industry as a whole tests new ways of working and learns from them in order to create this positive new world of digital advertising.
Ryan Afshar
Head of Publishers UK, LiveRamp
LiveRamp is a leading data company offering identity resolution that is integrated throughout the digital ecosystem, providing brands and their partners with the foundation for true omnichannel marketing. Its services aim to transform the technology platforms used by its clients into true ‘people-based marketing channels’.
