Articles by: "Alexandra Theriault, Chief Growth Officer – Lotame"

How Data Collaboration Platforms are transforming publishing

December 9, 2024 Alexandra Theriault, Chief Growth Officer – Lotame

As digital publishers seek to expand their revenue streams, strengthen their data capabilities, and keep pace with evolving adtech, data collaboration platforms (DCPs) have emerged as powerful allies. According to recent market research, DCPs benefit not only marketers and agencies but also publishers. They equip publishers to enhance their first-party data, gain valuable audience insights, and offer advertisers high-quality data—all while maintaining a competitive edge in the open web vs. walled-garden debate. Here, we explore how DCPs can transform digital publishing in an increasingly data-driven world.

Data Collaboration Platforms as a key solution for publishers

For publishers, data collaboration platforms are becoming invaluable. DCPs unify data silos, expand reach, and provide deeper consumer insights, making them essential tools in today’s data landscape. Publishers with strong first-party data can offer advertisers unique, high-value data and insights through collaboration, further enhancing the advertiser’s ability to reach relevant audiences.

Recent research Lotame conducted, fielded by Cint, shows that 44% of marketers and 40% of agencies currently use collaboration technology, not including clean rooms. Publishers have an opportunity here to build strategic partnerships with advertisers because then can help them fill in gaps in audience data, improve targeting precision, and create unique insights unavailable elsewhere. By leveraging DCPs, publishers can maximize the potential of their data assets. They have the ability to facilitate more accurate cross-screen measurement, bolster audience targeting, and deepen advertiser understanding of reader interests.

Shift in programmatic spending between open web and walled gardens

One of the report’s most surprising findings is the near-equal division of ad spend between walled gardens and the open web. While it may seem that walled gardens dominate the advertising market, 50% of marketers plan to spend equal amounts on open web and walled gardens, which amounts to 25-49% of their budgets. This balanced spend is promising for independent publishers, as it reflects a renewed interest in high-quality inventory and a move away from a reliance on walled-garden platforms.

As advertisers diversify their spending, publishers on the open web have a chance to attract higher ad spend by offering valuable, targeted inventory that rivals walled gardens. DCPs play a critical role here, allowing publishers to better target and measure their audiences, making the open web a more viable option for advertisers looking to connect with audiences outside of walled gardens.

Adoption of new technologies among publishers

Investment in data technology is at an all-time high, with data collaboration platforms leading as a priority. While traditional query clean rooms are being phased out by some—25% of marketers and agencies plan to retire these due to high costs and limited scale—data collaboration platforms are gaining popularity. They offer a flexible, scalable approach to data integration and collaboration, without the technical challenges or expenses associated with clean rooms.

For publishers, this shift toward DCPs offers a streamlined and cost-effective way to handle collaboration. With DCPs, publishers can more easily collaborate with brands and other entities without the high barriers or technical limitations of clean rooms, enhancing data fluidity and maximizing revenue potential. By adopting DCPs, publishers can stay technologically agile, ready to meet evolving advertiser needs without compromising on data quality or scalability.

Budget priorities and transparency needs in Real-Time Bidding (RTB)

Transparency and ease of doing business are critical to open web spending. According to the research, the top priority for marketers when considering increased spend on the open web is the ease of curating deals with publishers on high-quality inventory matched with data—a priority shared by agencies. Publishers can capitalize on this need by simplifying deal structures and ensuring transparent, high-quality inventory offerings.

By addressing these transparency needs, publishers can make it easier for advertisers to allocate budgets to the open web. DCPs help publishers align their inventory with advertiser data needs in real-time, facilitating seamless, data-driven deals. This transparency can enhance trust between publishers and advertisers, making the open web a more attractive alternative to walled gardens for RTB ad dollars.

Benefits of DCPs beyond targeting: attribution and personalization

Beyond improved targeting, DCPs offer benefits in personalization and attribution. This aligns well with publishers’ goals to provide a valuable user experience.

For publishers, these capabilities translate into higher engagement and monetization potential. By tapping into the personalization and audience segmentation features of DCPs, publishers can not only serve relevant content but also ensure that their audience experience is enhanced, leading to longer engagement times and better monetization. These capabilities resonate with the needs of modern advertisers, allowing publishers to meet demands for high-quality advertising in a competitive digital ecosystem.

There is a promising landscape for publishers seeking to stay competitive and capitalize on new data technologies. By investing in DCPs, publishers can address limitations in first-party data, build stronger relationships with advertisers, and offer transparent, high-quality inventory on the open web. As the balance of ad spend shifts toward a more open ecosystem, DCPs offer publishers a path to optimizing programmatic revenue and delivering a personalized, high-performing audience experience. With these tools, publishers can thrive as critical players in the evolving ad landscape.

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Data clean rooms are not one size fits all. What do you really need?

November 21, 2023 Alexandra Theriault, Chief Growth Officer – Lotame

Right now, publishers and advertisers have data collaboration firmly on their minds. That’s because collaboration is key to driving the most value from their respective first-party data. And there are good reasons why data clean rooms (DCRs) have been cited as publishers’ best bet for successfully collaborating with advertisers – and their data. However, it’s a challenge to understand how today’s DCR options differ and which one (or more) to select.

Armed with the right DCR, publishers stand to take back control of their customer data and media revenue. Some factors may put publishers at an advantage: percentage of authenticated traffic from logged-in users, breadth and depth of first-party data categories, and overall footprint of data per region. The end goal is to bring as much first-party data, on a common identifier, that is relevant to an advertiser – and to do it in a controlled environment. That’s all necessary to produce a meaningful, useful output.

A needs evaluation

Before unpacking four common DCR categories and how they vary, it is critical to have a clear understanding of your specific needs so that you can make the best choice for your media company (and maximize the value of your data).

Honestly evaluate your organization’s:

Use case. What are the specific needs of your advertising clients?
Technical resources. What current staff do I have or need to properly prepare first-party data and execute clean room implementation, analysis, and connectivity into the tech stack?
Time to value. What timelines am I willing to work with, without negatively impacting revenue?
First-party data. What data do I own? And what volume of it is tied to a hashed email (HEM), mobile ad ID (MAID), or other common identifier?

Categories of digital clean rooms

Ok, now that you have a better understanding of what you really need, here are the four main DCR categories we’ve seen emerge this year along with some tips about which might be best for your needs:

Data warehouses/clouds

In this variety, the data is stored in a warehouse, then transferred to a clean room for partner collaboration. This is how Snowflake operates – built on Amazon Web Services. Many pubs favor the cloud model, as it reduces both the need to port data sets from one location to another, and the related risk of data leakage. There are opportunities here for technical customization, for a business with the engineering or data science resources to take on the task. Attribution and measurement are a good use case for this category.

Walled gardens

Some Big Tech platforms offer their own DCRs – Google’s Ads Data Hub, for example – while also partnering with other tech providers’ clean rooms. Walled gardens may offer straightforward implementation for businesses with limited tech resources. They may also provide some flexibility for publishers and advertisers to work with the data sets and partners they want – but any customizations may demand an assist from a data scientist. Keep in mind walled gardens are often resistant to move data from their own respective ecosystems, after participants port it over. Use cases for advertisers include activation, suppression, and measurement.

Data collaborations

Here, participants onboard their data and use one of several available common identifiers to collaborate. In some cases, a participant can bring in another partner to collaborate without paying extra fees. Data collaborations allow for activation in environments outside of a walled garden – a feature walled gardens themselves don’t offer. They deliver user-friendly implementation, and advertiser use cases include data analysis, data enrichment, and activation via monetization of a desired audience.

Queries

Query clean rooms are engineered for collaboration in a neutral environment. They connect various clean rooms and environments, and they don’t require participants to port over their data. They’ll support any common identifiers the participants choose. As such, analyzing data overlap is an advertiser use case here. Query clean rooms will require tech knowledge and resources to oversee data orchestration, but a generalist with some training may be able to manage it successfully.

Looking beyond factors like the use case and the resources available, publishers will need to ask questions about the data itself while vetting potential partners. Some critical questions to keep in mind:

Do the participants have enough compliant data available now for successful collaboration, or can they count on having it in the future?
Can the data be enhanced or modeled out using machine learning?
Who needs to access the data, internally or externally?
Where is the data currently stored?

Tailoring clean rooms to publisher needs

Ok, so it’s clear that one size does not fit all when it comes to DCR’s. But your specific needs may not be met out of the box, regardless of the solution you choose. Media companies may also find that getting all of their preferred advertiser partners into the same clean room is a challenge in itself. You need to consider whether your organization has the tech resources to support clean rooms from multiple providers. The tech itself and its capabilities (or limitations) might not be the core problem, though. The more basic issue may be with relationships between partners. This is where a strong identity framework can be a bonus, as it can provide interoperability.

One more consideration: Publishers will find that many clean rooms are engineered for marketer use cases. And brands that have a good deal of influence in the marketplace will also want to push their publisher partners into their own preferred clean room environment. Publishers need to make sure they or the clean room provider can manage integrations across various clean rooms, to provide the reach that incentivizes advertisers to spend.

There’s no such thing as a universal DCR that can manage all relevant use cases and business needs. While there has been plenty of talk about clean rooms, turning talk into action has been minimal thus far. Publishers would be wise to coordinate with their largest, most strategic advertiser partners to identify which clean room(s) support their primary goals and align with available resources.

About the author

Alexandra Theriault is the Chief Growth Officer for Spherical, a suite of CDP accelerator solutions, at Lotame. Alex oversees the Spherical team working alongside brands, helping them maximize the value of their first-party data to enable personal development, enrichment, analysis and advertising activation. In her prior role as Chief Customer Officer, she led the organization’s customer focus, programs and strategy across six continents. Alex brings 16 years of experience designing, developing and delivering world-class customer success for global brands, agencies, platforms and publishers across martech. She serves as an advisory board member on Lotame’s Diversity & Inclusion council, and served as an advisory board member for a martech start-up in the affiliate space. Prior to joining Lotame, Alex was with IndustryBrains, a leader in monetizing B2B & Financial publisher content through contextual advertising, a subsidiary of Marchex.