Month: June 2020

To battle back against this and help recoup lost minority-focused publisher revenue and expand the reach for brands, keyword blocking tool Mantis has partnered with diversity-focused media network, Brand Advance. 

“Brands should get to choose where their ads appear, but blanket blocking is not a brand taking a stand, it’s just lazy,” said Brand Advance CEO Christopher Kenna. Since mid-March, ad spend through the Brand Advance network has increased by 400%, he added.

Neither Kenna or Reach could say for certain whether advertisers have increased their keyword blocklists over the last few weeks since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last month which touched off huge protests in the U.S. and globally. But an increase in spend through Brand Advance, without adding on the layer of nuance and scrutinizing lists, will inevitably lead to more content blocked.

“Brands need to revisit their blocklists and consider if they are discriminative,” said a U.K. news publisher which hasn’t noticed an increase in keyword blocklists in recent weeks. “Words such as ‘black’, ‘LGBTQ’ or ‘Muslim’ should never feature on a blocklist but often do, having been put there five years ago,” the publisher said. “Brands that are concerned about words such as ‘lesbian’ for fear of being on a porn site should probably check their lists rather than demonize a section of society.”

Even before coronavirus and the impending economic slowdown, smaller publishers for minority communities were already in a tight spot, struggling to generate digital revenues in an ecosystem where most of the ad spend growth went to Facebook and Google. In the U.S., Ebony magazine, and its sister publication Jet, closed filing for bankruptcy last April. Gay Times is in its fourth iteration. Last July, Gay Star News was acquired by Iconic Labs, saving the title from closing. 

Since coronavirus took hold, the growth in marketing through Brand Advance’s network — which represents U.K.-based titles like Attitude, Gay Times, Diva, Pink News, The Voice, Essence and The Muslim Vibe — has come from brands and government institutions targeting essential workers on the front line, said Kenna. 

“Before, wrongly, people associated [minority groups] with low-skilled workers, now bus drivers and cleaners are key workers,” said Kenna. “Are brands reaching this demographic more? Yes. All brands are being helpful all trying to reach this demo, ads are now aimed at key workers.”     

There’s a lot of money on the table. Globally, the LGBTQ+ community has a spending power of $3.7 trillion. The spending power of U.K. Black consumers is £300 billion ($377 billion). The total spending power of families with at least one disabled person is estimated at £249 billion ($313 billion) a year in the U.K.

In general, the advertising budget spent targeting cohorts rarely marries up to their buying power. While brands covet youth, 47% of all consumer spending in the U.K. is by people over 50 years old but accounts for only 4% of total advertising budget.

Looking ahead, the question is whether interest in targeting these diverse communities will remain high once the worst of coronavirus is over.

“It will be a fight, there are huge levels of inertia in the way brands and agencies approach media buying,” said Ben Pheloung, general manager of Mantis at Reach PLC, adding that it’s often laziness of ignorance rather than malicious intent from brands.

Regardless, there’s a growing gap between what brands and agencies say they do and the action that’s taken. But Brand Advance is working through agencies showcasing the tools — Omnicom Media Group is using Mantis via Brand Advance — and the growing groundswell is that brands have to be held accountable. 

“Brands want little black boxes on social, they say they are in this for the long run, whether it’s Nike or Adidas or L’Oréal being friends again with Munroe Bergdorf,” said Kenna. “Now it’s time to put their money where their mouth is. We have put all the tools in place, what possible excuse could anyone have to not divert more spend towards [minority communities]? We will fight every minute.”

In short, the majority of marketers are still grappling with the onerous task of linking customer identities to unify siloed assets. This is a crucial prerequisite for everything that follows — deeper customer understanding leading to better brand experiences. These marketers need the ecosystem to step up and provide a better toolbox.

Enter the “universal ID” –– a game-changer not only for marketers but also for consumers.

Universal IDs are poised to unlock the best of both worlds

Universal IDs provide a shared, persistent identifier to trace the user across the supply chain without the clunkiness of cookie syncing or the platform risk of operating system IDs. Simultaneously, from a marketer’s perspective, they share some of the best characteristics of existing methods: the democratic nature of third-party cookies (where every cookie is essentially equal) and the simplicity of Mobile Ad IDs.

According to the IAB, “the habits or search queries for a user on YouTube may be significantly different from their interaction on Instagram, Amazon or even when engaging with editorial content. A digital ID on one does not automatically translate to another. And that’s why implementing a universal digital ID could be beneficial.”

Moreover, while smaller or independent technology players need to contend with the multitude of challenges presented by different types of user identifiers, the walled gardens maintain a major advantage. This leads to an disproportionate concentration of power in the ecosystem. Marketers, too, are increasingly wary of ceding control and compromising clarity. Universal IDs help level the playing field.

Forging a path from unification to universality

The concept of universal IDs has been growing in popularity since 2019, but Google Chrome’s announcement at the start of this year regarding the deprecation of third-party cookies has dramatically accelerated their adoption. Rumors of the impending demise of mobile identifiers  — still not officially announced — have also contributed to these efforts gathering steam.  

In some respects, the mechanism of universal IDs does not deviate dramatically from those of cookies. Their implementation is quite simple, at least conceptually. When a new user visits a publisher’s or brand’s property, their key identifiers –– email address and/or phone number –– are collected, typically in hashed form. These are collected along with the source domain, which is then appended to the central identity graph — in effect a master match table maintained by the universal ID provider. The publisher then receives a tokenized version of the user identifier that can be utilized to identify that user for first-party data management.

The publisher-specific universal ID serves two purposes: 

–Unification: The universal ID enables the publisher to unify siloed first-party data under a single user/customer view, essentially the fabrication of a private identity graph. In this regard, it functions as a master first-party “cookie” but one that is persistent and valid across all data collection channels. The same ID can also be used for relevant second- or third-party data enrichment and serves as the backbone for better segmentation or analytics. 

–Universality: The second application of the universal ID is in the context of activation, i.e., its use as a currency in the ecosystem. Since all tokenized versions of the ID are derived from the same key user identifiers, they’re all intrinsically connected and therefore effectively interchangeable for the purposes of marketing transactions, including the most prominent use cases of ad buying and measurement. Specifically, and simplistically, the tokenized version of an ID passed by the sell-side can be linked with the tokenized version of the same ID that resides with the buy-side; they both point to the same user record in the master match table.

Universal IDs are not without their challenges 

The very design of universal ID frameworks requires users to identify —  to log in using an email address or phone number. This naturally has an impact on scale. In order to maximize identification coverage, publishers will need to be more aggressive in deploying authentication (login) walls across their properties and think about these three areas:  

–Experimenting with consent collection: It’s crucial to start testing different methods to collect emails from login walls and incentivize users towards logins. Consent collection has shown that those who start to experiment early on — with differentiated messages and user experiences — have been a lot more successful in this space than those who are hesitant.  

–Wider adoption: The success of a universal ID network will be contingent on its adoption as a currency by the marketing ecosystem. While it’s unlikely there will be one network to rule them all, it would also be counterproductive for scores of them to mushroom across the industry.

–Increased interoperability: It’s likely that a handful of large global players and potentially a couple of relevant regional ones — such as publisher alliances — will emerge. Increased interoperability will contribute to their effectiveness and ease of use outside of the dominant walled gardens. In order for these to foster the buoyant health of the industry, the emerging players should be democratic rather than engender a new concentration of power. Nobody wants to see one duopoly give way to another. 

A sustainable solution to linking customer identities to unified assets demands a multilateral governance model based on collaboration. Universal IDs can be that door to the long-awaited change that can ultimately bring satisfactory results to a whole industry in a transparent and compliant manner. Publishers should feel empowered to embrace the road ahead.