Articles by: "Aarti Suri, Global Strategy Manager, Publisher – Permutive"

Why publishers see success in direct-sold programmatic

June 5, 2023 Aarti Suri, Global Strategy Manager, Publisher – Permutive

Advertisers that solely opt to access publisher inventory through the open marketplace (OMP) face significant addressability problems. While the OMP completely changed the way media owners and advertisers collaborated, becoming the “path to least resistance” for both buyers and sellers, it is now creating more resistance. But as with so many things in life, what’s old is new again and direct-sold strategies are delivering benefits to publishers once again.

Open programmatic no longer serves its purpose

Even with Chrome’s third-party cookies still in play, only 30% of audiences on the open web are targetable. This is because 40% of Chrome’s users make their data unavailable to advertisers and the Firefox and Safari browsers already operate without third-party cookies.

Open web addressability is a big problem: Why would advertisers want to use the majority of their ad spend to reach 30% of audiences? There is also no guarantee of premium inventory and placements as well as a lack of control and transparency in the OMP as a result of ad fraud and third-party targeting that doesn’t deliver on the audience advertisers are trying to reach.

In light of this, publishers are re-evaluating their strategies. For example, one parent and lifestyle publisher made the proactive decision to reduce their reliance on the OMP, not just because it isn’t a reliable source of revenue, but because they can’t control their narrative with buyers in that environment. Working with advertisers directly means they get to highlight non-endemic audiences at a scale they can achieve.

Publishers need to make revenue and ensure they are giving their audience the best possible experience, while advertisers only want to reach the most relevant people within this audience. The lack of addressability in the OMP leads to failure on both fronts.

The building blocks of going direct

Between October and November 2022, the IAB surveyed 223 buy-side ad investment decision-makers and found that 53% planned to increase their focus on ad placements with publishers using first-party data. According to a report by Adweek, brands like Hershey’s, which spend between $350M- 450M annually on advertising, realise they are spending a lot of money and not showing up in premium environments. Hershey’s now has a target of buying 80% of addressable media via private marketplaces (PMPs) and only 20% on the OMP.

Publishers’ first-party datasets—built on authenticated, contextual, declared, and behavioural data—can be leveraged by advertisers directly to activate unreachable audiences. But for this shift to work, publishers must continue encouraging buyers to see the benefits of working directly with them and perhaps even educate an entire population of buyers that have worked primarily with OMP.

To do this, publishers need to satisfy advertiser demand by providing quality audiences from interest, intent, and in-market audiences, provide scale and ensure reach across all relevant platforms and browsers, tell rich and compelling stories about their audiences via deep insights, showcase how audiences are built and be transparent about audience creation, and demonstrate how their first party audiences can help deliver and improve performance mid-flight and achieve advertiser objectives.

Reaping the benefits

Publishers already working this way benefit from using their first-party data to drive direct deals, and buyers are seeing an improved performance. Trusted Media Brands (TMB), whose titles include FailArmy, Family Handyman, Reader’s Digest, and Taste of Home, have been working on their data strategy to ensure they can understand audiences across all browsers, especially in cookie-blocked environments such as Safari.

TMB now delivers direct-sold campaigns 94% of the time using first-party data. The work has resulted in a 140% increase in revenue from deals using first-party data, a 31% increase in RFP win rate when data is on an IO and a 2X increase in deal size when data is present on an IO vs no data.

Similarly, Gumtree is seeing results from using first-party data in direct deals, with a 36% increase in click-through rates in Q1 2023, and a 14% increase in average cost per thousand impressions.

The driving force behind addressability

The best way for publishers and advertisers to maximize their revenue and budgets, respectively, is to focus on addressability. First-party data and direct-sold will be the driving force behind that.

Direct deals deliver quality first-party data and scalable first-party audiences that meet advertisers’ needs, increase transparency, and control, and enable access to premium inventory and ad placements. Working direct also results in insights and reporting into audiences on how they inform an advertiser’s targeting strategy. Advertisers know where their ad spend is going and which audiences they are reaching with more accuracy.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Content and context make premium publishers’ audiences addressable

August 29, 2022 Aarti Suri, Global Strategy Manager, Publisher – Permutive

Increasingly, consumers are opting out of targeted advertising, leaving publishers searching for ways to continue serving marketers’ desire to reach relevant audiences and to optimize ads for audiences. A significant part of the answer for many will lie in publisher content, context, and the savvy application of first-party data. To do this, publishers must capture powerful insights they have available to monetize the most relevant, high-value consumers – all without compromising their privacy.

Much of the adtech ecosystem has kept their eye trained on when Google will or won’t deprecate third-party cookies. There’s also a great deal of focus on existing and pending privacy regulation. While these are valid concerns, we do need to work in the here and now: Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies and Apple’s ATT makes opting out of tracking incredibly easy. And in Europe, consumers already have the ability to “reject all” cookies via Chrome.

The reality is consumers are already opting out of advertising more than ever. However, publishers can still make those audiences available for advertising. With their content and their unique, direct relationships with users, publishers are the keyholders in re-establishing a connection with unreachable consumers.

Advertising powered by content and first-party data

Publishers are the keepers of a crucial component of advertising: content. Visitors to publisher sites certainly continue to engage with content, even when they’re not traditionally visible or they’ve opted out of third-party cookie tracking.

Publishers have access to a wealth of traditional first-party data. Not only is this first-party data more reliable than third-party data, but it’s also more powerful. And, because the data is owned by the publisher, they can target these known audiences on behalf of advertisers. Beyond that, they also possess a great many applicable insights from page signals created by users around categories, concepts, emotions, sentiment, keywords, and entities. The power of these data points ensures that publishers can maximize both addressability and revenue.

Traditional contextual targeting is often as simple as placing sports ads on sports pages, but that’s not enough. With the right technology, publishers can build next-generation contextual targeting that not only builds bridges between their own content but provides additional value to advertisers in terms of scale and accuracy.

Beyond simple context, publishers can learn from consented users’ data and create an affinity score for each piece of content, based on page attributes. This can then be matrixed with a publisher’s cohorts to predict how likely a given cohort is to engage with a page, compared to the site average. By leveraging their own content and the rich first-party data they have access to, publishers can deliver accuracy and scale to advertisers from first page-view. And, critically, they can do all this while respecting user consent.

Direct advertiser-publisher relationships

Advertisers are preoccupied with evolving timelines for the depreciation of third-party cookies or new regulations. However, the reality is that without the right publisher partners, they already cannot reach large swaths of audiences. The California Consumer Privacy Act, Apple’s Hide My Email and App Tracking Transparency, and Safari/Firefox are all impacting consumer choice to opt-out of invasive data collection – and even advertising altogether.

Things are different when advertisers partner directly with publishers that have consented first-party data from their audience, particularly when it is paired with contextual signals. These publishers are uniquely equipped to activate users and make otherwise unreachable audiences available to advertisers – without compromising consumer privacy.

These direct relationships provide another pathway for publishers to make desired audiences available to advertisers. They also shift power away from the data-driven duopoly and place the power back in the publishers’ hands. Publishers’ position to maximize their trusted relationship with audiences provides a viable alternative to third parties that exist only to commoditize publisher content and data.

Consumers’ increasing methods of protecting their own privacy are, ultimately, a positive for the industry – especially for publishers with strong first-party data practices. But this brighter future can only be embraced if we acknowledge the need to invest in those practices and ensure consumer data is treated responsibly.

About the author

Aarti Suri is a Product Marketing Manager at Permutive. Aarti has worked in the marketing, advertising and communications space for over 10 years, this includes experience working with OOH, Media Owners, Ad-Tech and in SaaS businesses. An advocate for a more inclusive industry, Aarti is a mentor and member of Bloom.