With the programmatic marketplace becoming increasingly bloated and fragmented, the challenge of identity resolution in a privacy-first, consent-based marketplace is forcing a total re-imagination of the digital advertising supply chain. Last week, IAB TechLab called out six critical business challenges, Google’s Privacy Sandbox must address. In my view, no independent company can offer a direct replacement for a third party tracker, because, it was never owned by any company in the first place. And it was FREE! Expecting Google to take on this responsibility and offer a replacement, and that too on their browser, free of cost, is not going to happen. There are no free lunches.
I have tried to bring those six critical business challenges into two broad themes. Firstly, there is a need to capture and carry both identities and impressions across digital advertising supply chain. Secondly, availability of first party data, or the lack of it and the related investments made by both demand and supply side need to be fairly balanced. This can only be done by an independent neutral function.
Enter Curation. Curation provides the supply side an opportunity to leverage their data by giving more value to their impressions. It decouples data and analytics from technology thereby providing the much needed compliance for privacy and consent. You can call it DMP 2.0. You can even call it CDP 3.0. Overall, Curation helps in resetting the balance between demand and supply; and data and technology. The benefits are immense:
1.A strong ad quality infrastructure with direct integration amongst all the partners offers control over data and inventory.
2.As a neutral independent service, it rationalizes the digital ad business by solving for its current opacity and complexity.
3.It brings brand safe, premium, curated inventory to the forefront as against working with too many SSPs.
4.It integrates new data sets and deliver auction packages with multi-publisher deal IDs in a scaled environment.
5.As a clean room, it brings efficiency through the creation and monetization of cohorts while keeping data secure in the native environment.
With curation, publishers will be able to collaborate with data providers, brands, and retailers in a privacy compliant manner to build PMPs, package their first-party data with inventory from third-party publishers to sell to buyers. Curation shifts the power to leverage, back to the publisher from the DSPs and SSPs and rightfully help the publishers take control over not only their data, but also their partners data, including the advertiser. Clean Rooms as the Curator offers five significant commercial advantages.
1. Better monetisation of data: Existing DSPs typically only share impression counts with data providers, but curation technology brings a more granular suite of data points into demand – including advertiser, agency, publisher, placement, device, geo and more. Such insights are priceless. Data providers can understand which combination of ad formats works and how first-party data improves outcomes for buyers. By decoupling curation from the DSPs, multiple types of data across demand and supply side can be packaged into one PMP. Combining audience data with panels and context, will also to address the performance-versus-scale challenges of the new identity landscape.
2. Full funnel advertising: Publishers can now integrate their signals with retail media platforms as a full funnel PMP. Retailers just cannot simply make customer data available to many different platforms for everyone’s use. Walmart acquisition of Vizio is a very good example. However, there are quite a few other retailers who are not in a position to create their own retail media platform. Curation is a virtually free way for retailers to launch media offerings in a privacy-safe manner as self-serve PMPs without standing up their own ad tech infrastructure. Curation in the form of data cleanrooms, helps maintain buyer, brand and seller exclusions to navigate conflicts.
3. Real-time Cohort Creation: Publishers and their partners across brands and other data owners never have to move their data out of their tech stack – they simply apply whatever segments they desire against a curated PMP and have their third-party managed campaigns buy against that aggregate media product. Because the brand isn’t moving data at a user level across platforms and owners, they can keep control over their data and update their respective consent management system without any fear of compliant default. This helps in being dynamic in creating the segment and save huge amount of time is setting up the campaigns.
4. Efficient Self-Serve Platform: Apart from the top 50 advertisers, SMEs generally want self-service DSP capabilities. This is the single largest friction in the system today when it comes to the adoption of “audience extension”. A non-programmatic way, that requires a manual insertion order is the least preferred approach to audience extension. Audience extension also requires publishers to learn and operate DSPs, an investment that is hard to justify without much demand. Curation takes this friction away for the SMEs as publishers can pre-package their first-party data with third-party inventory from the open web, and make it available to them as PMPs in their DSP of choice – while still retaining control over pricing, packaging and access.
5. Scaled Up Marketplace: Curation also opens an exciting addition to sell-side video strategies from publishers. Scaled publishers with robust first-party data tend to have limited video content and vice versa. With curation, text-focused publishers can package their data with premium CTV/OTT inventory and give their sales teams a premium video product to sell to buyers. The end beneficiaries for curation are the brands and the media agencies. Markets are still evolving towards building their own first party data. Current data sources don’t often serve the full set of media buyers’ needs. Curation makes data integrations simple; saves a lot of time while sourcing CTV supply.
Often, I was asked what is the difference between a CDP and a DCR (Data Clean Room). There is strong logic for such a question, and this reasoning got further enhanced when LiveRamp bought Habu to make their SafeHaven solution, really safe. Every enterprise now has an ambition to build their first party data.
They all need a CDP. And for a CDP to be made useful and monetizable, they now believe they need a data clean room. It is all now becoming too expensive point solutions that continues to make the adtech/martech stack even more bloated and fragmented. In my view, data clean rooms must not be seen as yet another point solution. It should be seen as an altogether new service, a privacy by design curation service, that balances demand with supply and offers an equitable platform for all the participants.
Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.