As consumers across the globe become increasingly aware of their digital identity and personal data rights and further regulations take hold, it’s unsurprising that Google has announced it will not be replacing third-party cookies with identifiers and email addresses.

Advertisers now need to look for new ways to engage valuable customers on a one-to-one basis. Digital targeting and measurement strategies that the industry has grown up around will need to be rebuilt for a privacy-first world.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the industry – to champion privacy while finding new and innovative ways to provide marketers and consumers with relevant, targeted ad experiences. The industry needs to determine the best path forward and partner to develop strategic identity solutions, enabling publishers to maximize the value of their first-party data, help advertisers meet their business goals, and build consumer trust in digital advertising.

A new vision for a new digital identity ecosystem

Collaboration between partners within the digital identity and advertising ecosystem is now more important than ever. Suppose advertisers want to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns across the whole of the Internet. In that case, they need to be working with partners who can join up these conversations without operating a walled garden. Greater collaboration is also vital for local premium publishers to continue developing creative, engaging content for consumers, which is the foundation of their ongoing success.  

The central principle of navigating this changing landscape is for the digital advertising industry to understand where it goes with respect to identity, and it needs to do that with consistency. This means how it will handle identity in the face of the death of third-party cookies, the rise in regulation, and the evolving ways that it is buying and selling advertising today.

Increasing regulation around data privacy – such as the GDPR in Europe – has been one of the biggest drivers for change in our industry. So, advertisers will want to work with companies adhering to data regulations and encouraging transparency within the supply chain. On top of that, many brands will need to feel a sense of ‘safety through familiarity.’ When discussing compliance, it helps to work with a partner with similar challenges, protocols, and internal processes. For example, a bank or a telecommunication company is going to want partners that can demonstrate their security frameworks meets the country’s data privacy standards, as well as your company’s individual privacy standards.  

With cookies, these have been relied on for a very long time, yet we’ve seen over the past year or two that we can generate brilliant performance leveraging solutions that do not rely on this. However, as things stand, there isn’t one silver bullet to identity or one single solution, and it won’t be solved for some time. What needs to be done now is to take a very deliberate multi-pronged approach to solve identity. While first-party data goes some way to achieving this, brands can get market-leading performance and competitive advantage even by just using strong and innovative contextual solutions. It’s important for brands not to stand still at this point; testing innovative new solutions will mean you’re well equipped to deal with what comes next. 

Adopting new models to meet changing needs

For publishers, this means that they need to look at how they can use their proprietary assets to evolve their business models and package and sell their inventory in a way that best meets the needs of the buyer in our rapidly changing digital advertising landscape.

Developing different ways to generate and acquire authenticated first-party data will be one key area of focus for publishers. Many are already doing that as they look to build out subscriber bases. This means that if a person uses their email address every time they visit a site, the publisher can use it as a persistent identifier. From here, they can start to build a profile of that user and what their interests are. By better understanding individual users, publishers’ inventory becomes more valuable to advertising partners, as they can effectively target specific audience profiles. 

Alternative ways that publishers can use their assets, such as building up contextual solutions. The ability to build contextual profiles has advanced greatly since the early days of simply placing adverts for mortgages in financial publications. Today there is much more accurate contextual information about specific articles, so publishers should be looking at utilizing this. Today you can even use contextual solutions to match the sentiment of a piece; for example, if you’re a brand selling retro cameras, you can target context that generates the feeling of nostalgia. 

In the future, publishers will need to consider device-based advertising. If we consider the devices that will support advertising or do already support advertising, very little of that is cookie-based anyway. A raft of different devices will come into play here, such as smart speakers, CTV, and even wearable tech. None of this will be dependent on a cookie, so there needs to be continued investment in exploring these areas and the new audiences they offer. 

With the right data protection, privacy controls in place, and the right partners on board, it remains possible to provide consumers with critical choices and insight into the value exchange of advertising and content. By these means, we can also ensure that we enable publishers and marketers to achieve the required outcomes. At this point in time, the worst thing you can do is stand still and wait for something to happen around you. Your audience is still there online, so it’s important that you take all the steps necessary to continue connecting with them.

The digital advertising market has doubled in size over the past five years, with the total ad spend in Europe approaching €50 billion, according to the IAB. The success and continued growth of the market is reliant on the massive volumes of data produced each day – an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes globally – which enable advertisers to target specific audiences with relevant, personalised messaging that drives campaign performance. 

IAB figures show that data-driven advertising is vital for the sustainability of European digital media, producing 80% of revenue for journalistic content and 50% of revenue for mobile apps. Yet access to the data supporting advertising cannot be guaranteed, the way it is used is sometimes questionable, and its value to advertisers is rarely quantified. The recent enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with its emphasis on how personal information is collected and stored, is fundamentally changing attitudes towards consumer data and the access advertisers have to it.

Perhaps it is time for a new approach, where advertisers think not only about the value of the media themselves, but also about the value of the data that guides ads as well?

Currently ad spend is broken down by channel, with reports such as the Adex Benchmark report referencing formats such as search, social, video, and display. Equally, we are a long way from data making it as a separate item in attribution models. While the IAB in the US and the Winterberry Group have taken steps to look at data spending in their annual benchmarking study, this type of evaluation is still a rarity.

When measuring the simple total spend on digital advertising there is no separation between the data and media that together form an ad campaign – ad spend stats currently include both combined. Media buyers are clearly aware data is valuable, illustrated by the fact they are willing to bid higher on programmatic impressions that have user data associated with them, but it’s not clear how much more – the specific value of data is often not quantified outside of a percentage of media spend or “free” with the price bundled into a broader package. If there were distinct and standardised figures for both media and the information behind it, it would be easier to assess the quality and value of data and ensure the most effective ad campaigns.

So far, the industry has shied away from making this distinction between the cost of ad media and the cost of information due to the possibility of negative connotations associated with using consumer data and a reluctance to draw attention to its value (at either end of the scale). The perception of user profiling and audience targeting has been of an underhand or deceitful tactic, illicitly taking valuable data that belongs to the consumer and using it to convince them to buy. In reality, however, data in advertising is used to improve the consumer experience and make it more relevant, so as long as the data is collected openly and with the user’s consent, there should be no taboo around the use of consumer profiles.  

Breaking out data from media spend would also provide much greater transparency for an industry which all too often creates opaque processes, black box solutions or bundled products. Some vendors ostensibly give data away for free, only to claw back the value via another service or product. Given the centrality of data in the advertising value chain, shouldn’t we be able to put a measurable economic value on it? 

In a climate where the GDPR imposes strict rules on the use of data, and where episodes such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal make consumers more aware of how their data could be misused, the role of data in advertising is – quite rightly – being brought into the open. Rather than relying on third-party data, which previously played a central role in digital advertising, advertisers are increasingly demanding first-party data that has been collected with the full knowledge and consent of the user. 

Post-GDPR, the overall availability of first-party data is likely to decrease, with Smartpipe research revealing consumers have mixed views about giving consent for their data to be used for personalised advertising. In the worst-case scenario, where users were asked to give specific consent to individual ad tech vendors, only one in 10 gave permission to use data for this purpose. However the quality and value of data collected with user consent is likely to significantly increase. For example, French ad tech platform Smart reported that the two-fifths of ad calls it now receives with consumer consent sell for 95% more than the remaining calls that don’t have consent.    

What’s more, the digital advertising ecosystem is being cleaned up, with some publishers using the GDPR to drop ad tech vendors who aren’t dealing with personal data in a compliant manner. Many providers are signing up to industry standards such as the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework, which will also hopefully help lead to bad data practices being eliminated. 

The net result of these changes is that the buying and selling of ads is more transparent, and consumer privacy and personal data in the context of digital advertising is being openly discussed. 

Against this backdrop of increased openness in data use, now is the perfect time to start quantifying the value of data. With new strategies and technologies in place to ensure quality and transparency, it is only a small step to apply this to ad spend. If information on the value of data were readily available it would provide insight across the whole process, allowing advertisers to analyse spend and the value of partner data more deeply, as ROAS could be determined against both data and media. It would allow ad tech providers to understand the worth of the data they have access to and value their services accordingly. Ultimately separating the value of data from the cost of ad media would provide a basis for more relevant and engaging ad campaigns, which would benefit not just the industry, but also the consumer. 

It is time to stop being shy about how valuable data is in the digital advertising ecosystem. In the new era of openness and transparency, putting in place industry-wide measurement that specifically recognises its contribution will improve the quality of data available, enhance its usefulness to advertisers, and increase the relevance of resulting ad campaigns to consumers. After all, what gets measured gets delivered.

Political parties contesting for the upcoming elections in UK can now up their game with Twitter’s latest geo-targeted advertising. Postcard targeting allows for campaign targeting on a much more granular level.

The geo-targeting will provide advertisers (or campaigning political parties) accessibility to specific regions, metropolitan areas and postcodes. With this precision, advertisers can customise their pitch in context to the the different areas, in order to connect with and win people over at a local level.

Presently, political parties and enterprises in the UK can target audience by nine different regions and focus Twitter ads to target a variety of metropolitan areas like Birmingham, Liverpool-Manchester, London or Glasgow, according to the Twitter blog post making the announcement.

VentureBeat points out that this isn’t the first instance of region-focused advertising offered by Twitter with brands already being able to target consumers in 30 countries, “like the U.S., Canada, France, Spain, and the U.K.”

The Twitter blogpost highlights three key ways parties can fuse the targeted advertising with other strategies:

1. By focusing issues relevant in some constituencies, single issues such as health, education or employment can dominate an election battle. Postcode targeting gives voters the chance to push these issues and ask questions and for candidates to respond.
2. Voters in constituencies can know their representatives better and the candidates stand a chance to show who they are and what it is they stand for.
3. Political parties have to think at a national level and often act on a local one. Postcode targeting is one way that political parties can do this.

Even with the advent of smart devices, what is still notable is the fact that only a fraction of the U.K. population (23%) are Twitter users. Campaigners will certainly have to rely on other methods as well to reach out to the voting public.

Read the full blogpost here.

Follow @DataconomyMedia

(Image credit: UK in Jan 2011 – Twitter sentiment by Robin Hawkes)

According to an article in the LA Times, Verizon Wireless will be “enhancing” its Relevant Mobile Advertising by monitoring customer activity on wireless devices as well as wired or Wi-Fi connected computers and laptops.

“In addition to the customer information that’s currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites,” said Verizon Wireless in a message to customers. “This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network.”

Cookie’s will be installed onto users’ computers – laptops and desktops — which will give Verizon access to their customers’ data even after leaving their web service,  “My Verizon.” As such, the cookie will provide the company with data on the spending and online activities of their customers. Through this collected data on the customers’ mobile and desktop devices, Verizon will pass this information onto marketers for targeted advertising.

Although Verizon claim that the data collected is completely anonymous, attention has been called to the fact that Verizon will not warn their customers when the cookie is downloaded onto their computers. Verizon claims that this new service will not harm the privacy of their customers, and may in fact help their users by only receiving adverts that are most relevant to them.

Read more here

(Image Credit: Robert Scoble)

Datalogix collects consumer data both online through tracking and offline, e.g. through obtaining data on customer loyalty card programs. Datalogix then parses this information and sells it to its clients so that they can optimise their advertising campaigns

Acxiom is a stock exchange-listed company offering marketing and information management services to its clients. By sifting through mounds of data collected itself Acxiom manages to generate sufficient insight for their clients to aid them in e.g. targeting their advertising campaigns better. As “one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of” (FRONTLINE, June 2007), it helps marketing departments uncover the (un)known needs of consumers. Acxiom was founded in 1969 in Conway, Arkansas and now employs 6200 people (2012).