Articles by: "Pierre Diennet, Vice President of Product Management – Lotame"

4 proposals for navigating post-cookie identity

April 5, 2021 Pierre Diennet, Vice President of Product Management – Lotame

In early March, Google announced that it was committing to its FLoC method of targeting and would not support alternative identifiers in any of its adtech products. The industry had a small, and understandable, panic attack.

Don’t worry. This is good news. There are still a lot of alternatives available for each use case. Alternatives include cohorts, contextual, authenticated identity, and probabilistic identity.

Cohorts

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) is technically the addition of a semantic classifier to the Chrome browser. It will scrape page content and URL data and qualify users into small segment groups based on their navigation history. Everyone’s still being tracked, but now only by Google.

It’s a pretty blatant data land grab. Google is using the specious legal argument that if a consumer browses the Internet with Google Chrome, all of the data collected while they browse is the first-party data of Google. Publishers, marketers, and most importantly users of the internet should take a careful look at what Google is doing.

Critical questions:

Is the algorithm that builds these cohorts going to be open to publishers and partners for investigation?
How exactly will Google decide what cohorts to qualify users in? And how can we be sure they won’t be the cohorts that make Google the most money?
How will Google differentiate between valuable and less valuable scraped content?
If one company controls the advertising of, the discovery of, the navigation of, and the monetization of the internet, how is this not an antitrust issue?
Are cohorts privacy safe and are there controls for the consumer? Why, for example, has the Hague flagged FLoC as potentially non-GDPR compliant?

If it’s neither privacy-compliant, nor competitive, nor pro-publisher, then what’s FLoC’s value to the industry?

Contextual targeting

Contextual has gained a lot of traction in recent months. There are some that think contextual targeting is a privacy carte blanche. The truth is a little more complicated. Contextual does not require user consent as long it’s scoped to a single page of content.

However, as soon the context of more than one page is combined, even in session, even on a single publisher’s site, it becomes tracking. Thus, it carries the same legal burden of consent as any other tracking method. Further, without cookies, device IDs or other third-party identifiers, contextual has obvious struggles. These include precision, scale, frequency capping and, most importantly, measurement, which is critical to attract spend from advertisers.

Our recent survey of publishers and advertisers found more than 69% of U.S. publishers are bullish on contextual targeting as a replacement for audience targeting. However, 66% of advertisers disagree. That’s a big enough divide to question placing all bets on context.

Authenticated identity (deterministic)

Authenticated, or deterministic, identity requires the user to provide a known piece of personally identifiable information, such as an email address. To obtain that email address, publishers, data providers, and brands ask consumers to log-in or register to a site/app to access free content, deals, or other services.

There are a lot of worthwhile pros here. Because it can be tied to a person, it’s a highly accurate solution and great for targeting and measurement. Additionally, user consent is easy to track, which allays privacy concerns.

However, how much of the web requires logging in? Early estimates expect the authenticated web to capture 10-20% of users. Scale is a real issue. Some publishers have a clear advantage in the authenticated lane. The vast majority of publishers will struggle to drive authentication, while others have built their value around free and open content. Without deep technical and monetary resources to draw on, authentication could be a game-over for many.

Non-authenticated identity (probabilistic)

To capture the rest of the 80% of the open web, publishers can use non-authenticated identity. This is better known as probabilistic ID. The tech behind the probabilistic method assigns a cluster of devices and browser signals to an ID that can be moved via established pipes into activation channels. Publicly available, IAB-approved signals can include IP address, time stamp, or browser user agent.

Probabilistic identity is the perfect complement to deterministic identity. Probabilistic is data minimized with no email, home address, or phone number required. It scores points for consumer privacy and ensuring that no brute force attack on an encrypted ID can reveal an email or a phone number.

Unfortunately, probabilistic identity is also widely misunderstood in the industry. While it does rely on IP address, some misconstrue it as fingerprinting. In fact, probabilistic identity has no more or less privacy burden then multi-page contextual targeting that leverages a first-party cookie. IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework 2.0 stipulates that “with consent, vendors can create an identifier using data collected automatically from a device for specific characteristics, e.g., IP address.”

Certainly, it’s up to you to pick the best solution for your business. That said, it always makes sense to diversify your toolset to capture the most revenue possible. It’s too early to tell which tools will perform best for which marketers. So, having all of them at your disposal allows you to work with more brands.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

The 4 most important questions to ask when evaluating identity solutions

January 6, 2021 Pierre Diennet, Vice President of Product Management – Lotame

The identity solution landscape is growing fast. I can count at least 10 solutions that launched last year alone. Third-party cookies are approaching their final exit. Identity is seen as a viable and sustainable way to keep digital advertising running and help large and small businesses alike survive. That’s all good news.

But like most things in adtech land, parsing through how technical solutions differ often requires an advanced degree and a good translator. It is technical for a reason. However, that doesn’t mean technology can’t be accessible and approachable.

I’ve spent the bulk of the last two years working on an identity solution, so I have some opinions. I’ve also spent a good deal of that time talking to other identity solution providers. There are a lot of smart people working on very difficult problems from a multitude of angles. If you’re not excited about the amount of innovation happening at this tremendous clip, you may be in the wrong industry.

For those not steeped in the tech parlance, however, vetting identity solution partners is daunting. So, in an effort to provide clarity, I’ve culled my top four starter questions that every identity solution partner should be able to answer. Frankly, these are questions every marketer, publisher, SSP, DSP, and data provider should ask.

Four critical questions to ask identity solution partners

1. Does your solution support the authenticated or open web?

The authenticated web refers to those users that register and login to a site, app, or platform. Email address is the most common form of authentication, and that identifier then becomes the key to accessing content or other services. Early estimates predict that publishers can achieve at best 10-20% of authenticated users by 2022. That’s great progress to be sure. But what about the other 80% of consumers? Capturing their attention is just as important as authenticated users. This is particularly true for those businesses interested in top funnel activities like prospecting. For maximum scale and coverage, consider leveraging both authenticated and open web identity solutions.

2. Does your solution support enriched or empty IDs?

An enriched ID is exactly what it sounds like. These solutions were built with data enrichment at the core with the goal of helping marketers and publishers execute more relevant and responsible advertising. Some IDs offer up to 200+ behavioral attributes within their IDs. This offers a treasure trove of privacy-compliant, pseudonymized data for targeting, optimization, reporting, frequency management, and more. But not all identity solutions are created equally. Many others are empty. They exist to leverage first-party data alone, which may sacrifice accuracy based on a single contextual visit or single point of view (the publishers), as well as scale. Additionally, some require a fee to use them and charge additional costs to coordinate and attach relevant data for addressable advertising. Weigh all of these costs and factors when evaluating your identity partners.

3. Where privacy is concerned, is your ID transparent or opaque?

You could ask “Is your ID privacy compliant.” However, the above question will tell you much more about a company’s actions when it comes to compliance. Until U.S. federal law exists, I’d advise to look to Europe’s GDPR, some of the strictest regulation around consumer privacy, for guidance on how to vet an identity partner.

GDPR prioritizes control, transparency, and accountability when it comes to consumer data. In that spirit, look for a solution that makes it easy and accessible for consumers to access, request, and delete their data. Further, seek a partner that minimizes its data collection and communicates accountable IDs to every channel. This ensures a clear, auditable trail as opposed to opaque providers who obscure themselves to users, reduce the ability to see data sharing across platforms, and hide tracking methods.

4. Is your ID solution interoperable or siloed?

You may be wondering with so many ID solutions out there, can they and how will they talk to each other? That’s an excellent question. This is a critical area to dive into with your partners for several reasons. Number one, there may be translation activity fees you need to build into your budget if the ID solution is not interoperable out of the gate. Second, if the ID isn’t freely accessible, you may experience some technical difficulties with sharing across various platforms in other regions. And, third, if the solution doesn’t permit communication across and between IDs, all that rich consumer profiling and segmentation work you did on the front-end may be lost in the lack of translation.

All the right answers

If, however, you find a solution that does all of the above — true interoperability across channels, platforms, and other IDs — that means your portfolio approach will be working most effectively. I trust these four questions will lead to lively and transparent conversations. We all need to be talking more and more openly to solve for a post-cookie, privacy-first world. What questions are you asking identity solution partners? I’d love to hear what’s top of mind for you as you navigate this landscape