Login
close
Login is restricted to DCN Publisher Members. If you are a DCN Member and don't have an account, register here.
Search

Digital Content Next logo

Menu

Tags containing: "first party data"

Advertising

Are you ready? Two-thirds of publishers aren’t prepared for a cookieless future

The digital media landscape is on the brink of a transformative shift with the impending phase-out of third-party cookies. Despite Google’s latest delay, adoption is slow while the urgency for adaptation remains high. Teads recently undertook a survey to shed light on the preparedness of global publishers. It reveals a striking disparity in readiness and confidence, and found an alarmingly low level of digital media companies that are prepared for the state of advertising in a cookieless world.

The current digital ad landscape

Teads surveyed 555 publishers across 58 countries, uncovering critical insights. Alarmingly, only 32% of publishers are actively preparing for the cookieless advertising future. This indicates a significant portion of the digital media industry is delaying action, potentially waiting until the deprecation’s full impact becomes unavoidable. However, some organizations are taking proactive measures to be ready for the change. 

Confusion and confidence

Our survey reveals that 53% of publishers feel overwhelmed by the numerous cookieless advertising solutions available, and only 28% feel confident in their understanding of the new landscape. This confusion is a significant barrier to effective adaptation. Heather Carver, Chief Revenue Officer at Freestar, notes the importance of developing durable technologies and strategies. “We’re using this time as an opportunity to strengthen our cookieless solutions. We’re focusing on developing durable technologies and strategies that will remain relevant regardless of cookie policies.”

Anticipating the financial impact

Publishers expect the financial implications of the cookieless transition to be substantial. Approximately 45% of publishers expect a significant decrease in ad revenue, with a 120% increase in concern year-over-year. This is underscored by findings that cookieless traffic not only fills less but also yields less, putting revenue streams at risk.

Login struggles

Despite the many challenges media companies face as they prepare for a cookieless advertising future, there is a positive outlook among some publishers. About 44% see the transition as an opportunity to leverage their first-party data and enhance content quality. Furthermore, 37% of respondents appreciate the privacy benefits of cookieless solutions expressing confidence in finding new ways to monetize their content. 

Preparation and proactive identity solutions

As publishers adapt to this brave new world, many are experimenting with cookieless solutions and leveraging first-party data to set themselves up for success in the years to come.

Kedar Prabhu, VP of Product Management at Dow Jones, highlights the importance of leveraging first-party data in a world with or without cookies. “By focusing on the wealth of data generated by our direct and long-standing relationships with subscribers, we’ve not only prepared ourselves for the post-cookie world but have also unlocked new opportunities for growth and engagement,” Prabhu said. “We can offer our advertisers targeted, effective ad placements based on direct audiences composed of known users and enriched with real, meaningful insights into preferences and behaviors, all while maintaining the privacy standards that our customers and regulators expect.”

Similarly, the IAB is undertaking efforts to develop standards that support the industry’s transition. Angelina Eng, VP of IAB’s Measurement, Addressability & Data Center, emphasizes the need for robust guidelines: “We see this as a critical time to advance our guidelines and frameworks to support the industry’s transition,” Eng said. “We’re accelerating our efforts to develop standards that address the needs of a cookieless web, ensuring that all parties can navigate this shift smoothly.”

Other publishers, like Freestar, are using this time as an opportunity to strengthen our cookieless solutions. “We’re focusing on developing durable technologies and strategies that will remain relevant regardless of cookie policies,” Carver said. “The extension doesn’t change our momentum. But it allows us more stability for testing and implementing these solutions.”

Tier-specific insights and strategies

The survey also highlights differences in readiness and strategy among various tiers of publishers:

Tier 1 Publishers: Leading the Charge

  • 52% believe the changes offer an opportunity to differentiate through first-party data and content quality.
  • 62% have a signed-in strategy, and 38% employ dedicated resources for cookieless solutions.
  • 74% engage directly with advertisers using first-party data.

Mid-Tier Publishers: Strong Adaptation

  • 74% engage directly with advertisers through first-party data.
  • 32% have a strong grasp of the evolving digital landscape.
  • 36% have specific resources for exploring cookieless technologies.

Lower Tier Publishers: Facing Challenges

  • Greater dependence on industry solutions like Seller Defined Audiences (SDA).
  • Only 22% have a strong understanding of the shift towards a cookieless advertising framework.
  • 17% are testing cookieless alternatives, reflecting a slower response to industry changes.

As Simon Klein, Global SVP of Supply at Teads, states, “Despite Google’s recent announcement, the phase-out has only been delayed until early 2025, and the reality of a cookieless world is here,” Klein said. “This data underscores the urgent need for industry-wide adaptation and the critical role of innovative solutions in this transition.” 

Digital media executives must adopt innovative technologies and forward-thinking strategies to successfully navigate the realities of a cookieless world. While many are in a wait and see holding pattern, there’s no time to waste. This isn’t a question of when. This change is inevitable. Proactive publishers are not only poised to be ready for the cookieless future of digital advertising, they are employing solutions that are helping them do better business today. 

About the author

James is a data leader with over 20 years of experience in digital advertising. As the Global VP of Data at Teads, he leads a team focused on data-driven solutions and the cookieless transition. He previously held senior roles at Microsoft, Verizon, AOL, and Yahoo, excelling in data-driven marketing strategies. A fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, James enjoys racing cars, cooking, and traveling.

Advertising | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

Advanced media strategy: navigating the first-party data shift

With the imminent demise of third-party cookies, the digital media industry stands on the brink of a seismic transformation that will create pressure for publishers to adapt quickly and efficiently. In my role at Dow Jones, as head of advertising product and technology, the urgency to transition towards first-party data and contextual advertising wasn’t just about staying ahead; it was a necessity to ensure our continued success in the digital realm.

This urgency is underscored by a stark reality: according to a 2023 Teads survey, only 16% of publishers felt prepared for the cookieless future. When Google announced the Chrome Cookie Deprecation in Jan. 2020, it became abundantly clear to us at Dow Jones that decisive action was needed to navigate this uncharted territory.

Facing the dual challenges of maintaining our revenue streams and upholding audience privacy, we envisioned a future where we relied exclusively on robust first-party data and developed a comprehensive game plan to bring that vision to fruition. This wasn’t just about adapting to a new set of rules; it was about reimagining our approach to digital engagement and advertising in a way that respects our readers’ desire for privacy and control over their own data.

Building an advanced advertising strategy

As a leading global business and information company that publishes trusted brands like The Wall Street Journal, our strategic vision was predicated and relied upon our subscription business, including the core high-quality audience of dedicated subscribers that serve as our core readership. We evaluated every aspect of our digital footprint, from the ways we engage with our audience to the methodologies behind our ad targeting. This wasn’t a simple process. It required a fundamental reshaping of our operations, systematic execution sustained over time, and a significant investment in new technologies and skills.

By focusing on the wealth of data generated by our direct and long-standing relationships with subscribers, we’ve not only prepared ourselves for the post-cookie world but have also unlocked new opportunities for growth and engagement. We’re now in a position where we can offer our advertisers targeted, effective ad placements based on direct audiences composed of known users and enriched with real, meaningful insights into preferences and behaviors, all while maintaining the privacy standards that our customers (not to mention regulators) expect.

Challenges and opportunities in cookieless digital advertising

However, this shift hasn’t been without its challenges. It’s been critical to strike a balance between maintaining innovative forward momentum and overcoming technical hurdles in a privacy-compliant manner that requires a judicious and collaborative approach to data. 

Despite this, the shift away from third-party cookies has presented numerous opportunities. We’ve been able to forge deeper relationships with our advertisers by offering high-quality audience signals, innovative new products and services built on those audiences, and the analysis that demonstrates value and outcomes.

A future built on trust and transparency

As we look to the future, it’s clear that the key to success in the digital media space is a combination of innovative technology and a commitment to user privacy. By focusing on first-party data and contextual advertising, publishers can navigate the post-cookie landscape.

Moreover, the importance of systematic and open collaboration cannot be overstated; engaging with experienced partners and technology providers, especially those who have proactively tackled the challenges of this new digital ecosystem, can provide you with fresh perspectives and new opportunities for growth. For digital media executives navigating this shift, remember: the future belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

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

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.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Advertising strategies: shifting tides from OMP to direct-sold

A data gap is growing in digital advertising as regulators become stricter, users choose cookie-blocked browsers, and Chrome slowly kills the third-party cookie. It has caused addressability in the open web to tank to 30%. However, publishers are in a powerful position to fill the data gap and already have a sustainable solution using their first-party data in direct deals. This means that publishers can create powerful and differentiated endemic and non-endemic, interest-based audiences for advertisers to reach 100% of users without compromising privacy. 

As part of DCN’s Hot Topic series, Joe Root, CEO and Co-founder at Permutive, sat down with David Minkin, SVP of Digital Operations and Client Success at Dow Jones, to talk about how the publisher’s first-party data strategy has evolved, and where they are seeing revenue growth. Dow Jones is a division of News Corp and is home to leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, Financial News and Private Equity News. 

Here are some of the highlights from that conversation. 

Open marketplace decline 

Publishers have seen open marketplace revenue decrease by 25% year-on-year in Q4, which makes it hard for publishers to forecast. Based upon his experience, Minkin puts this down to several factors. These include the death of the third-party cookie, the walls of the walled gardens getting higher, and traffic disruption from Google sending less traffic to sites, and Facebook sending less traffic to news publishers. “All of that puts downward pressure on the open marketplace, and its ability to maintain CPMs where they’ve been historically, and that loss of traffic is resulting in a loss of open marketplace revenue for many publishers,” he said. 

Most of Dow Jones’s digital advertising revenue comes from direct-sold, where they see “a strong interest and continued interest” as buyers leverage their first-party data. The direct deals they see include audience-guaranteed transactions, so a programmatic guaranteed (PG) deal with an audience layered on, and PMPs with audiences with that first-party data available.  

“I welcome that trend to continue,” said Minkin. “The yields are better in terms of those eCPMs we’re getting out of all those flavours of [direct] transaction. Also, I think there’s a lot in the open marketplace regarding ad quality issues. I’d rather know who is advertising with us and who is on our site. So as we move more to a world of direct PG and private marketplace (PMP), that certainly helps give me that sort of visibility I want.”  

Publishers may favour certain types of direct-sold deals over others, for example, a PG deal over a PMP because of the guaranteed spend over a period of time. Dow Jones has seen “substantial growth” in PG, where the yield is substantially higher than what the publisher gets from the open. 

Starting with the data 

Across Permutive publishers, in Q4 2022, audience-driven direct-sold was up 37% year-on-year and in Q2 2023, this increased to 62%. As publishers start to see the benefits of the shifting tides to direct-sold, they recognise it starts with building a strong first-party data strategy. This includes exploring how you go to market and getting the RFPs required around the audience. 

From Dow Jones’s perspective, their first-party data strategy has been a “seismic shift” that gained momentum when Google announced its third-party cookie deprecation a few years ago. Initially, it was about understanding what first-party data was available. What data needs to be available based on the demands from RFPs and what clients are requesting? And having the right technology in place, from building lookalikes to segmenting the data. “We’ve now gotten to the point where we’re virtually 100% only using first-party data,” Minkin said. 

This focus on first-party data must also translate across the business, particularly to go-to-market teams. According to Minkin Dow Jones has “done a lot of education over the past few years” to bring their sales team up to speed and confident in talking about the publisher’s first-party strategy. “A lot of that success is really because of my team – who are building a lot of these products and actioning a lot of these segments – working very closely with our product strategy team to roll this out to the sales team,” he said. “It’s really been an evolution.” 

When publishers build valuable first-party audiences, pricing strategies require some attention, especially around unique premium audiences. An example from Dow Jones is financial advisors, where the publisher is the best place to go to reach them at scale. “There are only about 300,000 or so financial advisors in the U.S. That audience is not commodified, and that commands a much higher CPM,” said Minkin. 

Future-focus 

When it comes to the future of their data strategy, Dow Jones plans to continue to build upon everything they’ve developed and implemented over the past few years. Minkin sees Dow Jones’s advertising product suite as truly mutlifacted and adaptable, where some solutions are high touch, and highly customized, while others are meant to be low touch and extremely scalable. 

The aim is to automate as much of the low-touch solutions as possible, allowing their teams to focus on the premium, high-touch campaigns. This approach “ultimately is going to bring in the bigger dollar values and have more impact for our clients.” Minkin added. “We want those campaigns to be as successful as possible to get more of those renewals.”

Advertising | Featured Post

Digital media’s successful symbiosis of subscription data and advertising

If content is king, then context is God. As third-party cookies vanish in the rear view mirror, first-party data is moving media companies to pole position for advertisers. So how are they using their subscribers’ data to provide better context than ever for advertisers – and increasing their own return?

News and magazine publishers have always boasted of their relationship with their audiences. Direct, unfiltered access to consumers has always been part of their selling point to advertisers. And that’s never been truer than now.

With Google still making its slow march towards the deprecation of third-party cookies in 2024, brands and advertisers are hungry for alternatives to ensure a good ROI. That has provided digital media organizations with a megaphone to shout about the data they have on their members and subscribers – data which has been freely handed over during and after sign-up, and which avoids the privacy issues related to GDPR and other legislation.

Dave Randall, UK commercial director for Future plc, points out that “Privacy updates have and will fundamentally change the way brands buy media. There is a seismic shift coming to a market that has been inundated with made-for-advertising sites, click farms, contentious user-generated content and questionable third-party data.

“I believe premium publishers with professionally produced specialist content are in the best place to benefit.”

Effectively, the creation of content that Future and other digital media companies know appeals to their audiences provides the context for effective advertising. Those companies, with their vast array of acquisition and conversion data relating to their demographics, can serve up ads relevant to the content against which they appear.

Research has demonstrated that consumers are not averse to digital advertising provided it is of personal relevance, also that they are wary of “creepy” means of determining that relevance. That provides media companies with registration walls with a huge opportunity: they can square the circle between serving up salient marketing and preserving privacy.

“For advertising to be successful, it’s important to build an environment in which both readers want to spend time and advertisers want to invest,” according to Imogen Fox, chief advertising officer of Guardian Media Group. “Too many ad-funded sites place the volume of advertising over the experience that users have when they visit the site. This reduces the likelihood of audiences paying attention to the advertising and the effectiveness of the overall campaign.”

Damon Reeve is CEO of the Ozone Project, a collective of premium publishers leveraging the context of their owned-and-operated properties to sell ads at better rates than would otherwise be possible. He explains that “Advertising in context and with a creative message that is contextually relevant will always produce a better outcome for brand advertisers.

“The current programmatic model emphasizes audience targeting [out of context]. But, as third-party cookies deprecate, that will drive renewed interest in contextual targeting and creative message, which will benefit premium publishing.”

Clearing the hurdles

All of the above is, of course, contingent on a number of factors. For one thing, it is still easier said than done to sign consumers up. For all the progress digital publishers have made in refining their acquisition and retention strategies, even the most successful have registered only tiny fractions of overall internet users.

Moreover, many of those registered users have provided nothing but name, email, and the journeys they make while logged into sites. It’s far better than alternative – unregistered users – but far from the holistic view of a user to which advertisers have become accustomed.

Reeve elaborates: “Registered [and] paying readers create a much stronger data signal than anonymous readers, that creates a better return from advertising as we can provide better targeting and insight to advertisers. This will only strengthen when third-party cookies deprecate, and the gap widens between the quality of the data from registered/paying readers and anonymous readers.”

A second issue is that privacy concerns are not entirely eradicated with the deprecation of the third-party cookie. While the use of data clean rooms or efforts like the IAB’s ‘Seller Defined Audiences’ tool can ameliorate those issues, it still requires investment on the part of the paper or magazine to initialize and optimize.

So, while the very nature of a media brand’s website provides some measure of context to the ads that appear on there, publishers need to invest to truly make the most of it. Products like Piano claim that “value difference between users, pages, referral sources, and other channels is not just two or three times higher but hundreds of times higher” when users are registered – but that requires media companies to partner up or pay for access to those data tools.

Blended future

The reality is that, for most mass-market media brands, neither subscriptions nor advertising alone will sustain them. While subscriptions have come roaring back to the fore for digital publishers, advertising is still on par with subscription revenue in terms of their priorities.

Smart media leaders are therefore thinking about how the two revenue strategies synergize, rather than keeping them separate. Katie Le Ruez, director of digital, Guardian News & Media, explains: “As privacy changes come into force, brands will want to continue to reach relevant audiences at scale as they do today, so they will need to lean into alternative tech and the contextual targeting that it offers. Greater numbers of people visiting websites will be unreachable using traditional advertising technologies, and privacy-preserving tech often relies on contextual signals.”

“At the Guardian, we’ve been testing solutions that serve advertising to audiences who choose to ‘reject all’. We know that multiple ad tech vendors who traditionally offered brand safety solutions are now pivoting to offer contextual solutions too. This is a clear indication that contextual advertising will have greater value in future.” 

And Randall believes that “Contextual advertising will return as a key pillar for brands to connect with audiences authentically. Alongside intelligent first-party data solutions, publishers and advertisers can further collaborate to make the future of advertising more effective and transparent”.

So, while the spray-and-pray approach to contextless digital advertising is unlikely to go anywhere, there is an alternative for more discerning advertisers. Just as the ads that appeared in print magazines and papers benefited from the context of the content around them, so too do the ads that appear on publishers’ websites. Combine that with the first-party data to which they have access, and those titles are poised to further differentiate themselves from the non-premium contextless adverts bought and sold on the wider web.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

How media companies can evolve their first-party data strategy

With third-party cookie deprecation looming on the horizon, first-party data is becoming increasingly important for media companies. Advertisers have grown accustomed to the granular targeting that cookies offered and seek solid solutions underpinned by strategy and technology that will deliver attention and engagement from a brand-suitable, high-quality audience.  

At Arc XP’s recent customer conference, Ryan Gladstone, Director of Product Management at Arc XP, and Nick Nyhan, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Upside Analytics, shared strategies that media companies can employ to leverage their first-party data most effectively. Here are the key takeaways:

Why should media companies care about first-party data?

First-party data is considered the highest-quality data available because the information is willingly provided directly from the source: your audience. Unlike second- or third-party data, first-party data is proprietary and more accurate and updated than when it comes through other sources. Moreover, you can use it on a granular level to improve how you serve and grow engagement, even creating bespoke audience segments unique to your market and content. That flexibility, coupled with accuracy and the ability to respond to browser changes and evolving privacy laws, makes first-party data a critically valuable organizational asset.

Strategically, first-party data is particularly important to gather and use to enrich both audience and advertising revenue models. When effectively deployed, the collection of first-party data leads to higher audience conversion rates. Organizations that gather first-party data are more valuable to advertisers and, therefore, are able to charge higher rates. Audiences are also more willing to provide first-party data if they see you as a trusted information source, if they hear it helps them have a smoother login experience, or a more relevant and personalized experience. When explained well, it is a win for you and your audience.

Start where you are: Crawl, Walk, Run

When developing your organization’s first-party data collection strategy, it can be helpful to conceptualize the journey with a three-level model. You have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to walk before you can run.

Level 1: Crawl

Segments are the key to driving more sophisticated business strategies with your audience. At level one, you’ll introduce some basic segmentation principles and practices to your organization’s data strategies. Start your journey by gathering data and creating easily addressable audience segments that you can use to advance both your audience revenue and advertising revenue strategies.

  1. Gather email addresses: If you’re not sure where to start, this is where to do it. Putting together an email list is a basic priority of first-party data. This single piece of information is the most important piece of data to many systems – from CRM (customer relationship management) to advertising and registration. If you’re going to ask for anything, ask for email addresses.

  2. Set up segmentation: Once a user has provided you with their email address, they’ll be more likely to provide you with other pieces of information, too. You can use this opportunity to ask questions of your audience that will help you begin to create audience segments.

  3. Start connecting the dots: Once you have email and basic survey data collection in place, you have almost everything you need to start creating simple but powerful addressable segments. All you need to do now is start tracking engagement. There are a lot of different ways to do that, but Google Analytics is a great place to start.

Level 2: Walk

When you enter the next stage, you should already have established the basic building blocks of your first-party data collection infrastructure. At this point, you can start to introduce new layers of sophistication to extend, fine-tune, and refine your existing strategies.

  1. Roll out progressive profiling: To extend the number and type of audience segments that you’re able to create, you’re going to need to gather more data. This will help you build out your profiles and get a more complete picture of your audience.
  2. Implement A/B testing: At this stage, one of your main goals should be to refine and optimize the systems you established in the Crawl stage. When considering changes to your website, for instance, it’s a great idea to run A/B tests on your audience to determine the most effective path forward. 
  3. Tailor your offers: The more data you have, the more explicitly you’ll be able to be target. However, you choose to segment your audience, try using the data to share relevant offers.

Level 3: Run

At the Run stage, you’ll be implementing greater levels of sophistication into your first-party data systems and using the information you collect to enable more complex long-term initiatives with more precision.

  1. Personalize your site: With enough data to work with, you may be able to tailor your entire site experience to each audience group. You might opt to show fewer ads to dedicated subscribers. Or you might advertise your own organization through in-house advertising to higher-propensity audience segments, but not others. That can make a huge difference and presents much larger revenue opportunities.
  2. Blend and extend your data: No matter how much you know about your audience, there are always opportunities to learn more. So in addition to progressive profiling, data can be potentially sourced from what is already resident within your CMS system or email systems, adding context about interest areas and times of engagement, further enhancing your knowledge and how to serve different segments.
  1. Share your knowledge: It’s not uncommon for media organizations to enter into an alliance with one another to share their permissioned first-party data. It’s as if you and your peers are each bringing a piece of a puzzle to the table and combining them to make something bigger.

Following these strategies can help you successfully build an audience segmentation strategy that navigates the impact of the third-party cookie deprecation while building a sophisticated approach that delivers advertisers genuine engagement with highly-desirable audiences.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

How publishers can take advantage of the holiday spending boom

Despite a looming recession, this holiday season looks bright for marketers and consumers alike. And there are definitely opportunities for publishers. A third of marketers plan to ramp up promotional efforts between now and December. On the consumer side, forecasts point toward spending upwards of $150 billion worldwide on Black Friday alone, with holiday online sales climbing 3% year over year. For publishers eager to sell valuable holiday inventory, Q4 2022 presents an opportunity to capitalize on retail’s biggest season.

2022 has also seen the continued expansion of Universal Identifiers, data clean rooms, and other cookieless targeting solutions that support privacy-compliant identity-driven advertising. Privacy concerns have led marketers to embrace these technologies to keep consumers’ information safe while ensuring they have access to the latest targeted product offerings. 

At the forefront of these developments is cookie-less advertising. As much as 40% of mobile web traffic is unaddressable without cookie-less solutions, making their adoption an urgent opportunity to expand the impact of marketing efforts. 

To take advantage of strong consumer tailwinds building up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond, now is the time for publishers to amplify their marketing efforts with the latest in privacy-friendly, identity-driven targeting. 

Strike deals to capitalize on high demand

Q4 is the time of year when advertisers will be most eager to buy, and publishers most eager to sell. In addition, the quarter offers a unique opportunity for publishers to leverage their inventory to meet the pent-up demand of a post-pandemic economy. These circumstances come with benefits for both parties.

Brand marketers will be looking to hit their annual goals during a quarter when a large percentage of their sales are expected to come through. Retailers will have valuable inventory they need to offload before the season ends. These pressures incentivize deal-making and could help publishers snag highly valuable direct deals that could turn into lasting relationships with advertisers.

Publishers can accelerate deals and stand out from the competition by taking measures to capitalize on higher ad spend during the holiday season. For example, they may try out media formats that they would generally avoid, such as sticky ad footers that better capture audience attention. Publishers may also consider packaging custom audiences, day parts, or ad products to lure brands. By laying out how they can help advertisers hit their year-end goals, publishers can benefit from this holiday season and beyond. 

Use first-party data and transparent metrics to stand out

Some marketers are facing tighter budgets given uncertain economic conditions. On the positive side, challenging times shine a light on measurable, cost-effective and privacy-friendly marketing tactics and channels. Digital media companies with first-party audience relationships and metrics have the opportunity to make the case that they offer this channel — in which case, concerns about marketing spend could become a business driver and competitive differentiator.

The key to standing out in the ad market is for publishers to make the most of the information available to them. Equip advertisers with the tools to accurately analyze results, proving to their CFO and other internal stakeholders that spending with your company is part of a strategy that drives meaningful ROI. Also, make the case that effective advertising is not just about reaching audiences at scale; it’s about reaching them in the high-quality, trusted environments that publishers provide.

Plus, if economic conditions do lead to a decrease in ad spend, there are benefits to some brands pulling back. In the past, aggressive organizations have gained lasting market share by getting in front of customers when rivals fled. In the event of mixed economic messages this holiday season, publishers who can make this case to advertisers will be the most prepared to succeed.

Experiment with cookieless audience targeting 

New anti-tracking rules and regulations are an opportunity for publishers to get ahead in digital advertising. First-party data sets them up to provide audience targeting and analytics around content themes. Solutions like creative data partnerships, data clean rooms, and identity recognition can help scale offerings. These tools can allow publishers to be their own best advocates, helping advertisers target audiences in the market for their products, consensually measure impact across channels, and prove ROI. 

Importantly, these solutions are not only available to digital media companies that focus on fulfilling programmatic demand. Organizations that focus on direct sales – which are enjoying a resurgence given the increased value of first-party audiences – can also incorporate identity-driven targeting and cross-platform measurement into their ad products. 

With regulations like the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) taking effect in the new year, now is the time to start testing solutions and take advantage of the forecasted spending boom in Q4. Publishers can prepare by arming themselves with the tools to help advertisers understand the impact of their dollars. If they do that, they’ll be able to maximize the value of their rich content and first-party audiences while earning the Q4 budgets advertisers are eager to spend. And they’ll get ahead of competitors who will be scrambling to get compliant for the CPRA in January.

Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

Publishers: here’s how to build a resilient audience extension offering

The case for programmatic media buying typically references a common mantra: “Right person. Right time. Right place.” Marketers enjoy the control that programmatic media buying affords them. They have the ability to value each ad impression independently on the basis of the user, the point in time within their purchase journey, and the quality of the media environment, among several other factors.

However, if pressed, many marketers would be willing to sacrifice “right place” in favor of “right person” and “right time”. In other words, they value the user and information about that user more than the location where they find said user.

Brands, and their agents, will frequently make room for strategic partnerships with publishers and content creators. However, the time and resources they have invested in developing audience insights and segmentation practices dwarfs their efforts to manage these strategic relationships. Advertisers have built out CRM databases and partnered with third parties to build robust customer profiles. They have partnered with data on-boarders and identity graph solutions, third party data providers and clean rooms. And yet, there is still an appetite for more targeting information, unique audiences, data points, and triggers – some of which are unique to publishers.

This focus on audience above media environment may represent a risk for publishers that are reliant on sponsorships and page takeovers. Those publishers may see performance media dollars redistributed to a wider swath of publishers where marketers can find their precise audience targets. However, it also creates opportunities that some publishers have already seized.

Audience extension: opportunity and trade-offs

One such opportunity that more publishers should be taking advantage of is the creation of an audience extension practice, in which a publisher makes their audience available to advertisers while those users are outside of their owned and operated domains. This practice can create a valuable stream of incremental revenue. It can be particularly valuable for publishers with access to unique data about their users, whether it’s in-market for products and services, interests, or authentic age and demographic information. However, there are several factors to consider when building an audience extension offering and ensuring that it is resilient in the face of cookie deprecation.

To make this work, publishers must be willing to accept certain trade-offs. Historically, publishers have expressed a few key reservations about launching an audience extension business. They cite concerns that it will detract from their direct sales business and loss control of their audiences among others.

These reservations can be addressed to a certain degree by how the offering is productized. For example, publishers can restrict audience extension to media plans that also include ad placement on owned and operated properties. They can also confine the activation to managed service rather than advertiser self-service, and limit advertiser tracking tools such as DMP tags. Ultimately, publishers will need to balance these tradeoffs in order to develop successful programs and earn recurring business from advertisers.

Getting audience extension right

Beyond the tradeoffs, there is more to consider as publishers look to stand up a successful audience extension operation. First, it will require sales and marketing resources that can effectively connect a publisher’s audience composition to a marketer’s target definition. Demonstrating the uniqueness and integrity of the publisher’s audience segments, as well as the potential scale, is critical to creating demand.

Second, it is important to have the tools to develop and configure audiences that meet buy-side criteria, as well as scale those audiences via sophisticated look-alike models. Third, it’s critical to have skilled and experienced execution teams. While Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) have become more user-friendly over the years, teams that can execute quickly and flawlessly will have more success in maintaining advertiser relationships.

Finally, publishers need to maintain a focus on measurement and analytics. This approach can position an audience extension offering as more than an add-on audience reach tactic, but rather a performant strategy that drives business outcomes for marketers.

Preparing audience extension for the future

As we look to the future, publishers should be thinking about how existing audience extension offerings need to evolve moving forward. As third-party cookie deprecation continues to erode cross-domain targeting, publishers that execute audience extension programs through Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) will face the same challenges that marketers face. They will struggle to deliver advertising at scale, particularly on Safari and Firefox, and they will find it difficult to demonstrate performance metrics that advertisers have come to rely upon.

Also, publishers that want to preserve their audience extension revenue streams will need to explore and test alternative methods of targeting, whether it’s an alternative identifier based on e-mail addresses or an anonymized identifier generated by the publisher. A publisher’s audience extension business can act as a solid testing ground for deploying alternative ID solutions, allowing publishers to see the end-to-end process and understand scale and performance.

Although Google recently announced a delay in Chrome’s cookie deprecation timeline, marketers are using this time to do more head-to-head testing between cookie-based buying and alternative IDs. They’re also preparing for measurement and optimization in the absence of third-party cookies. And they’re shoring up first party data and experimenting with clean room solutions.

Likewise, publishers with a vested interest in growing their audience extension business have an opportunity to prepare. Publishers will need to balance trade-offs as they decide which methods they use and who they partner with as third-party cookies continue to dwindle. Now is the perfect time to test and understand the revenue implications of shifting to alternative methods of executing audience extension programs.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Why you need a data clean room (and how to choose one)

Publishers and advertisers – it’s time to unite! With collaboration, both parties can win big. Data clean rooms are a critical component in maximizing this relationship because they give digital advertisers and publishers the right tools to collaborate on their first-party data and redefine the way they target and reach audiences.

In combination with deterministic IDs, data clean rooms help to increase the addressability of existing customers. They also provide a great way to improve the targeting potential of “unknown users” and the ROI of marketing efforts. This includes generating insights and enabling personalized experiences across the web – all while complying with data protection regulations. 

While data clean room technology isn’t new, the applications are not always well understood. For instance, if there’s a need for secure and privacy-compliant infrastructure to check data records for overlaps to enable downstream use cases – data clean rooms are the best fit. That’s because common variables or identifiers such as email addresses and other deterministic IDs are used. 

This provides valuable insights into target groups and customers and helps develop effective marketing strategies. The key here is that the original data sets always remain separate from other parties, with no access to each other’s data (i.e., between publishers and advertisers). In this way, each party retains sovereignty over its information, works in compliance with data protection regulations, and gains new insights on mutual data overlaps to foster a variety of marketing use cases.

New targeting and reach opportunities

Advertisers who control and use their first-party data have always looked for additional external data sources to increase their advertising efforts’ efficiency. However, they have often been hampered by data security and privacy concerns. These reservations can be addressed through data clean rooms, allowing everyone to better benefit from their own and others’ data in a privacy-safe way.

Publishers and advertisers have a comprehensive knowledge of their customers who have consented to use their first-party data. Independent data clean room partners can help overcome technological, legal, and data challenges all while making the data usable for collaboration between partners. In partially automated processes, selected data from advertisers and publishers are merged and sorted in a secure way. In collaboration with their preferred publishers, advertisers can increase their existing reach.

As a controlled, virtual ecosystem, data clean rooms open and connect closed spaces for advertisers and publishers and integrate seamlessly into a client’s existing tech stack. Collaborative partners work together in a privacy-compliant manner, deciding when and how to use their own data. It starts with matching defined data sets between both parties. Where it goes from there depends on what features the data clean room solution brings to the table regarding integration, automation, and activation.

Criteria for selecting a data clean room

Advertisers and publishers considering using data clean rooms should keep the following aspects in mind when making their selection:

Data

  • Is there sufficient first-party data available currently or in the future, and what is the value of this data for your business?
  • Is there an opportunity for scaled reach and quality in terms of data & media? For example, via integrated machine learning technology?

Use cases

  • Which use cases are to be implemented?
    • Consider internal company use cases vs. external data collaboration use cases (e.g. advertiser-publisher & retail media)
    • Data/marketing insights
    • Advertising use cases (such as retargeting, prospecting, and measurement and attribution)
  • What is the relevance of these use cases for the business (strategic/commercial)?
  • Which business units implement these use cases (BI/Data Science &/or Digital marketing/media) and how easy is it to access, control and activate data in the use cases?

Integration

  • What security standards does the solution provide? 
  • How intuitive is the UI/handling of the solution for the different stakeholders?
  • How integrated is the solution with existing ad tech?
  • What is the level of automation for stakeholders?

Scalability through integrated retargeting and prospecting capabilities

Matching data from both partners enables downstream processing for retargeting use cases in all data clean room solutions. In addition, some data clean rooms today use machine learning based on large data sets to create lookalike models (statistical twins) for prospecting opportunities. 

If these approaches are applied on the publisher side, scalable media use cases emerge for advertisers and agencies. Beyond the targeting options, some data clean room solutions are also integrated into the tech stack on the publisher side so that the use cases can run fully automatically, and the data is also loaded directly into the activation channels. 

Thus, advertisers can continue to run targeted and scalable campaigns based on their data, even without third-party cookies. Publishers using data clean rooms can, in turn, build powerful data sets from their first-party data and gain extensive reach. This makes them more attractive to advertisers and strengthens their position against walled gardens like Meta and friends. These tech giants have long been collecting consent and data on a grand scale. And because their data sets give exclusive insights into target groups, they’re irresistible to advertisers.

With data clean rooms, advertisers have a new opportunity to improve the quality of their data and increase their reach. And, by collaborating with advertisers using data clean rooms, publishers who’ve lost ground to digital heavyweights have a chance to regain lost ground and get a better return on their investment.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Content and context make premium publishers’ audiences addressable

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.

Advertising | Featured Post | Innovation | Policy | Revenue

Regulation, revenue, and relationships top of mind at the 2022 DCN Next: Summit

Held virtually January 31-February 3, the 20th annual members-only DCN Next: Summit was a gathering of digital content companies from all over the world.

CEO Jason Kint opened the event by offering his perspective on how the last few years have underscored the need for quality information. He also reinforced the need for trust, particularly as we move toward web3. “Where people have choice and a competitive market, where they spend their time, attention and relationships, trust will matter. Trust matters more than ever,” Kint explained.

Keynotes and discussion sessions touched on subscriptions, paywalls and reader revenue, video, film, audio strategy, and AI. The event also explored the political and technical forces shaping the media landscape today, with sessions focusing on cookies, identity, trust, privacy, and platforms.

The personal is political, and platforms

The opening keynote featured 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa speaking with investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. They discussed platforms and the critical role a free press plays in healthy democracies. As Ressa put it, “Until technology gets guardrails around it, until we get to the point where the platforms that deliver the news are redesigned so that lies laced with anger and hate do not spread faster and further than facts, journalists will be under attack.”

Investigative Journalist Carole Cadwalladr in conversation with Maria Ressa, CEO of Rappler

Platform concerns and necessary regulation arose again throughout the event, notably in Thursday’s final keynote. Attendees heard from U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, mere hours after a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights hearing.

Klobuchar, who has been working to hold big tech platform accountable, provided an update on the bipartisan antitrust app store bill that just went through committee, as well as other bills she’s leading.  “We just had an incredible vote on a bill that Senator Blumenthal and Blackburn and I … put out a few months ago on app stores: 21 to 1,” she said.

The bipartisan legislation, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would enable news organizations to collectively negotiate terms with platforms to provide fair compensation for news content. Klobuchar  told attendees, “The big issue is advertising money and fair compensation. These companies are sucking up the ad dollars using the original content that you produce and they’re using the data they collect from your audiences to compete against you.”

Chris Pedigo SVP, Legal Affairs of Digital Content Next, interviews Senator Amy Klobuchar

First-party data and identity

Unsurprisingly, the upcoming deprecation of the third-party cookie was a topic of much discussion at this year’s summit. The change has destabilized the advertising ecosystem. Experts discussed how to prepare for the post-cookie reality and how publishers could invest in their first-party data.

To prepare for the post-cookie reality, Rachel Parkin, CafeMedia’s EVP, Sales and Strategy, suggested publishers strengthen relationships with advertisers and build up their arsenals and come up with the right framework for identity and authentication for users and content.

TRUSTX CEO David Kohl suggested that publishers, by acting as a group to create scale, can create competitive advantage. ” We are in transition and there’s tremendous chaos in identity and audience data. But here’s the thing: Chaos creates opportunity,” he said. “And the question is, how can publishers take the lead in organizing the chaos? How can we band together? It is time to create an ‘easy button’ for scale.”

Another session discussed how publishers are leveraging consent-based visitor relationship data sources to fuel monetization as the industry moves forward into a cookie-less future. David Rowley, senior director data and identity products at News Corp. said they feel first party data is going to be one of the most important assets to a publisher. News Corp is assessing what’s out there for external identity solutions, Rowley said, and building out a proprietary identity solution.

“Publishers use so many different types of technology, DMPs, CDPs, analytics platforms, you name it, all of them spit out and create their own identifiers. Being able to stitch all of those together to have a unified view of a user is critical, so you can have that one-on-one relationship with a user,” he said.

People and empathy

Another theme that echoed through the conference was that of managing during these difficult times. As Agnes Chu, president of Condé Nast Entertainment remarked, “I think it’s hard to drive change during a time where people are experiencing so much anxiety themselves.”

Lindsay Peoples Wagner, editor-in-chief of The Cut, outlined that it’s important for leadership to have and bring a sense of empathy. Leaders must “be able to step outside of yourself and understand that, yes, we’re all employees and work at a company, but we’re human beings,” Peoples Wagner said. “People, especially in the past couple years, have had a really hard time with mental health or their family issues or being sick. It’s important to understand, I think, that people may need time, and that push and pull as a manager, I think is more important than ever.”

Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director of DCN interviews Lindsay Peoples Wagner, Editor of The Cut

The biggest shift for TripAdvisor’s Christine Maguire when the pandemic hit, was from building products to empathy. “I had to sort of take a step back and realize where everybody was in their journey,” she said. “Having empathy for what goes on in their day to day is so important, because oftentimes we come in to make a change when there is a problem, and that’s too late.”

The future of work

The newsroom of the future may look nothing like the pre-pandemic one. Indeed, as publishers move forward, they’re stepping into a future which doesn’t look much like the past. There’s upside, such as the ability to create more flexible working situations, which facilitates broader recruiting.

However, as author Anne Helen Petersen noted, when companies allow their employees to live anywhere and work any time, they may run into a lot of sticky situations.

“The larger question that a lot of companies are dealing with is if we say that people can have really flexible work schedules and can go in when it is most convenient for them, are we also going to put stipulations on the states or countries where they can live,” she said. “Are we going to say that they get into New York within the day, that they take the train in? Is that okay? Or are we going to say that it’s one flight away? What are our boundaries?”

The future of the industry

On the last day of the summit, Co-founder and CEO of Insider Henry Blodget and Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson engaged in a spitfire conversation about the digital media industry. They discussed the complicated relationship with platforms, new technologies like AI, NFTs and blockchain, and made predictions for web3.

Blodget was optimistic about the future of local news. However, he sees a different scenario play out for others going forward. As the industry evolves, he thinks there will be three to five big generalists, a bunch of targeted specialist publications that serve a particular niche, and everyone else is in the middle.

Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson in conversation with Henry Blodget Co-founder & CEO of Insider

“I do think we’re all going to face pressure and there’s going to be a lot more consolidation because there are enormous returns to scale,” Thompson replied. “We see that every day with The New York Times, when they roll out some cool new tech feature that they can spread across their 10 million subscribers.”

“Let us just acknowledge that The New York Times is Netflix of journalism,” Blodget said. “My view is in five to 10 years, they will have 25 million subscribers and they will still be growing strong and they will become one of the most powerful English language journalism publications in the world. And the rest of us are gonna have to find places to carve out what is left.”

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Building a privacy-first infrastructure for digital advertising

Privacy is rewriting the rules of adtech, causing seismic shifts to the way media is bought and sold.   

Over the past 10 years, digital advertising has run on personal data and identifiers that connect consumers across domains. Today, tightening privacy regulation and heightened consumer awareness about how their data is being used has triggered global changes. We already see the effect. The third-party data that fuels digital advertising is continuing to disappear. And Snap’s shares dropped by 25% because of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature in iOS 14.5, requiring consent from users to track them across apps and websites. It’s also reported that Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are set to lose nearly $10bn due to ATT. 

As privacy disrupts the way digital advertising has operated for years, we’re seeing two seismic shifts in the ecosystem. Firstly, there is a transfer of power in digital advertising towards first-party data owners. Secondly, there’s a move to processing data on-device. Digital advertising increasingly requires privacy at its core. Therefore, first-party data owners will need the infrastructure to control, connect and scale their data while planning and buying campaigns. 

The shift to first-party data and on-device  

Data that was once accessible by ad-tech is now deprecating because of privacy. Control of this data has returned to its rightful first-party owners. This includes publishers, advertisers, and other businesses that have first-party data. 

First-party data owners are able to build businesses from their data because they have a direct relationship with their users. Publishers such as Penske, Insider, Future plc, and others are launching successful first-party data platforms and packaging up their consented audiences for advertisers. For example, Future’s first party-data platform, Aperture, has increased the addressable inventory sold to advertisers by 150%. And Insider sees 19 out of its top 20 advertisers using its first-party data platform SAGA, at a 95% renewal rate. 

Advertisers are also bringing their first-party data to publishers to match and model audiences and businesses like Instacart, Doordash, Uber, and Amazon see tremendous advertising opportunities because they have first-party data. 

First-party data is made useful by on-device technology, but not at the expense of people’s privacy. This is because on-device makes it possible for data processing to happen in real-time. And user data stays on the user’s device instead of being sent to the cloud. It’s the direction of travel for the industry, moving adtech from an era that leaks data to a privacy-first era that protects it. In fact, other tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google have and are re-architecting their technology for on-device processing. 

Rebuilding for privacy 

We believe that privacy is a force for good in advertising, and on-device is the future of digital advertising. However, we need to rebuild and provide first-party data owners with the necessary tools to scale. 

For advertisers, the supply paths can be inefficient today because they need to build it publisher-by-publisher. Publishers also have no consistent way of making their data available to advertisers in a privacy-compliant and sustainable way. To seize the opportunities ahead of them, first-party data owners require a privacy-first infrastructure for digital advertising to be immune to any dramatic regulatory or browser-level changes, 

This infrastructure will help publishers and advertisers to connect safely. It’s a way for personalized advertising to continue for first-party data owners, a place where digital advertising can continue to thrive — without the data leakage we see happening today. 

Building on a privacy-first infrastructure is a long-term, sustainable strategy for publishers, advertisers and other first-party data owners. It will bring much-needed transparency, scale and privacy to digital advertising. It’s no longer the time for band-aid solutions to the impact of privacy on digital advertising. Any solution that isn’t grounded in privacy won’t stand up to oncoming regulatory, browser changes, and consumer scrutiny.  

About the author

Joe Root is co-founder and CEO of Permutive. Following a BEng Computing at Imperial College and MSc Computer Sciences at Oxford, Joe started Permutive with his co-founder, Tim Spratt, joining Y Combinator in 2014.

©2024 Digital Content Next. All Rights Reserved.