Month: July 2021

But they face an unforgiving environment. As publishers fight for ad dollars once derived from stronger third-party cookie tracking signals coming from across the web, they not only have the platform giants to compete with. Publishers such as The Independent, Livingly and BuzzFeed must also convince advertisers that their contextual audience approaches are worth paying for, even as Google’s decision to extend its deadline for killing off third-party cookies threatens to dampen urgency for trying out anything new. 

The Independent: not-your-everyday audience segments

The Independent’s six-month-old climate hub is intended to appeal to readers the publisher can assemble into “less common” audience targets, based on first-party data gleaned through interactions with climate-related articles or reviews for low-carbon travel destinations that indicate psychographic traits or consumer buying habits. It’s part of a plan to wean the site from a reliance on open programmatic marketplaces by conjuring new ways to sell inventory using first-party data-centric contextual targets. 

The concept the challenger digital-only news brand is testing: “Can we go to an auto manufacturer of an electric car or [consumer packaged goods] manufacturer of recycled plastic and say we have identified this user set as climate warriors?” said Blair Tapper, senior vice president at The Independent U.S. The publisher will only sell these new contextual audiences direct, via private marketplace deals or through programmatic guaranteed deals, said Tapper.

Tapper said a category reaching female investors is another one the publisher aims to grow through an editorial strategy that ensures there is content that speaks to audiences whom advertisers find valuable. While the publisher can find specific people to target based on matches to advertisers’ own first-party data, The Independent wants to help advertisers that may not have individual-level customer information to find unique audiences, said Tapper. “The more that we can identify voids in the market is an opportunity for partners to then come and work with us,” she said.

Livingly: testing a smarter network buy

Livingly hopes to convince advertisers there are better ways to reach people on its women-aimed sites than simply buying them as siloed site-specific audiences perusing lists of TikTok influencers on youthful pop-culture site Zimbio or top RV destinations on It’s Rosy, a site steered toward the 50-plus set. For instance, the publisher’s CEO Erica Carter said advertisers seeking new mothers can reach them while they’re assessing kid-proof furniture ideas on Lonny and while they’re visiting Livingly’s more endemic pregnancy and parenting sibling Mabel + Moxie through contextual audience segments built from the publisher’s rich understanding of its readers that target across all its sites.

“We have better insights about people across our whole platform,” she said.

Livingly’s cross-network segments are part of a new contextual targeting product called IRIS (Insights, Research, Intenders and Scale) which mines data indicating what people care about through editorial quizzes on Livingly’s sites. Answers to a question about vegan foods, for example, might be used to identify people who would be receptive to an ad for a meat alternative brand’s ad. The company will also develop questions for advertisers to insert into quizzes to build its audience segments.

But convincing advertisers to see beyond customer-level targeting that can drastically limit audience reach isn’t easy, said Carter. If advertisers are looking for new moms, the publisher can use its first-party data assets to find them rather than advertisers pushing a CRM database through four layers of tech. “With each funnel, you get a smaller and smaller addressable audience,” said Carter. For now, she said, that persuasion phase entails conducting small tests with advertisers to show how contextual targeting performance measures up to targeting using matched customer data.

BuzzFeed: commerce content for data collection

BuzzFeed — which turned quizzes into an audience-data harvesting art form — is still stumping site visitors with tests like the one promising to detect “Your Soulmate’s First Initial Based On The 4th Of July Party You Plan.” But nowadays shopping-centric product reviews and wish lists are helping the publisher learn more about people’s actual purchase intent in very specific ways. For example, titles in BuzzFeed’s shopping section feature reviews for items from stores like Wayfair or offer time-sensitive lists associated with holiday sales, like — yes — Walmart’s Fourth of July sale.

“We’re building out behaviors that allow us to create more loyalty within that shopping content,” said Ken Blom, BuzzFeed’s svp of ad strategy. In March, BuzzFeed launched a first-party data platform to offer customized audience segments for selling directly to advertisers and through private marketplaces. Ideally, said Blom, the new information the publisher can generate through its own content can give ad salespeople fodder to package audiences and insights in more customized ways advertisers couldn’t get through open programmatic auctions.

BuzzFeed is also adding site features, such as letting people add items to a wish list. Not only does that require a sign-up that generates an email address, but also it allows BuzzFeed to track when people clicked through to a product page. But to Blom, it’s not about affiliate marketing revenue. “Monetization, in my opinion, is to build up unique first-party data we can sell to advertisers,” he said. 

The advertising giant is also looking to strengthen its market position among publishers in fast-growing areas of digital media inventory, including connected TV, OTT and audio, vacuuming up executives from rival SSPs and looking to hire more.

Combined with the identifier that Amazon plans to launch inside its own ecosystem soon, these moves would help differentiate APS from a mob of competitors who are quickly gathering up market share as publishers continue to add more SSPs to their operations.

But they also have the potential to position Amazon’s SSP less as a helpful tool for sourcing and managing demand, and more like an entry point to the entire programmatic advertising ecosystem. 

“Our 3rd Party Buyer program connects thousands of publishers to the industry’s top monetization solutions, positions APS as a primary revenue partner for publishers, and provides a much-needed marketplace to connect both buyers and sellers to best-in-breed ad tech services,” one listing reads. “Much more than a traditional Supply-Side Platform (SSP), APS is increasingly building the backplane for advertising and media technologies.”

Amazon declined to make an executive available for this story. 

Though Amazon began offering header bidding tools to publishers almost 10 years ago, APS emerged over time, and it did not take over the market overnight. In terms of seller adoption, APS hung in the middle of the SSP pack before leap-frogging entrenched competitors such as Pubmatic and Yahoo. In 2019, Amazon became the second-most commonly used SSP after Google, according to the research firm Advertiser Perceptions, leaping up from eighth the previous year. 

Demand for Amazon’s unique inventory played a role in that growth. But its ability to serve as the hub of bids sourced from multiple SSPs also made it an attractive partner, particularly for publishers with more developed programmatic strategies.

“It works in a very different way from traditional SSPs, said a source at one publisher that uses APS. “It’s not a different flavor of all the others. “They’re pretty much server-side. All the connections, in addition to the Amazon demand — if we work with a Magnite, Index Exchange, Xandr — we can put them all through APS.”

Today, Amazon still holds that second spot — a majority of the Comscore 250 uses APS — but by much narrower margins. A cluster of competitors, including the aforementioned Yahoo (known, for now, as Verizon Media Ad Manager), Pubmatic and Xandr, is nipping at Amazon’s heels, as publishers add more SSPs to their monetization operations. 

In the first quarter of 2021, APS’s share of the market actually fell slightly, from 49% to 46%, according to Advertiser Perceptions data. That slide put it in a virtual tie with competitors including Pubmatic (44%) and Verizon Media (44%).

“Even larger publishers are often strapped for the time and tech support required to manage these setups, so SSPs that are able to help with heavy lifting do have an advantage,” said Lauren Fisher, Advertiser Perceptions’ evp of business intelligence. 

To keep pace, Amazon has been advancing on multiple fronts at once. It is vacuuming up executives from rival SSPs, such as former Index Exchange vp Gabriel DeWitt, and hunting for executives who can help build market share among publishers in emerging mediums, such as advanced TV, OTT and audio, according to job listings posted on LinkedIn over the past two weeks. 

It is also looking to broaden the kind of advertiser demand it can satisfy, focusing especially on “non-endemic brands” that aren’t advertising inside of Amazon’s own website. “They want to be a warm home to them as well,” said Julie Weitzner, evp of Sellwin, an Amazon consultancy owned by dentsu. 

The coming identifier should help with that — albeit not right away — as media buyers hunt for post-cookie ways to measure and attribute the outcomes of their ad spending. If Amazon’s identifier gains traction, publishers using APS standing to benefit from the attendant boost in demand. “The publishers have the most to gain from an Amazon ID,” said a source at one publisher using APS services, who asked not to be identified while discussing Amazon’s business. 

The services marketplace represents another piece of the puzzle. Though public details are scarce, offering publishers the ability to connect with ad tech solutions and integrate via Amazon’s server, in a way that won’t slow their own sites down, potentially puts them in a position that few other SSPs could replicate.

“It would be a fairly unique offering,” said Ratko Vidakovic, the founder of the ad tech consultancy AdProfs. “With Amazon’s strength in cloud services, combined with the existing adoption of APS, the company is in a position to provide a fast and reliable marketplace service that can accommodate the scale of even the largest publishers.

“Not only would this help with the age-old publisher problem of managing countless JavaScript tags on their sites, along with all the related site speed considerations, it also helps Amazon solidify its publisher relationships with a more comprehensive and potentially indispensable offering.”

Think of interoperability as the ways in which technologies function in conjunction with other technologies. Take email. If the way email worked was not interoperable, we wouldn’t be able to send an email using Gmail to someone’s Yahoo email account. But because email systems are interoperable, we can.

Why is it an antitrust issue?

When tech is built in such a way that it does not speak the same language as other technologies or erects barriers preventing other systems from connecting with it or from tapping into its data pipelines, it can prevent those other technologies from enabling certain capabilities, stifling their growth. As interoperability proponent Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it, “Interoperability is a key policy for a pro-competitive Internet” because it “undermines network effects that keep users locked into a conglomerate’s ecosystem” and “removes barriers for new entrants by letting small players piggyback on the infrastructure developed by big ones.”

Proposed legislation could force tech platforms including Facebook and Google to give other companies more access to information flowing through their systems. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter in some ways thrive by allowing outsiders to use sanctioned developer tools to build features that work in their ecosystems. When a company builds shopping tools that work inside WhatsApp conversations, that’s an example of interoperability, and arguably it helps Facebook-owned WhatsApp. But, because interoperability can open opportunities for upstarts to build new tech that works with those dominant systems, it could create threats to tech giants.

Aren’t there already a lot of open tools that enable interoperability?

Sure. For example, APIs — application programming interfaces — allow people to use Google or Facebook logins to sign in to other companies’ websites. And Twitter lets all sorts of companies build tech that works in conjunction with its platform and taps Twitter data such as tweets, conversation threads and query language using an API.

“Open APIs provide developers with access to proprietary software applications or web services and allow computer programs to ‘talk’ to one another so they can request and share information,” wrote Dave Pickles, founder and CTO of The Trade Desk in a 2019 Forbes article about how the software development community can spur more interoperability.

What are some ad tech examples of interoperability?

In the world of ad tech, interoperability might look like an advertiser telling Google to send The Trade Desk a record of all the conversion data associated with a brand or a campaign, said Adam Heimlich, CEO and cofounder of Chalice Custom Algorithms, a firm that builds custom algorithms that work in conjunction with ad tech systems such as demand-side platforms. In this way, if Google or other platforms controlling much of the digital ad market were required to allow more data access, it could help level the playing field, because a DSP might be able to use that information to improve its models in the hopes of ensuring that the appropriate ad inventory gets credit when someone clicks-through to buy something.

“To me it opens the door for competition around this data,” said Heimlich. “It’s a locked set of values, and when the data gets unlocked, those values also get unlocked.”

Is scraping a form of interoperability?

Tech that scrapes or crawls other technology — such as browser extensions that collect sites’ HTML code — is considered a class of interoperable tech. People often build tech that piggybacks on other tech in ways that could violate terms and conditions of the dominant tech. That’s why rules mandating increased interoperability are bound to spawn increasingly heated debate and pushback by the big platforms.

Take the growing crop of consumer-facing data monetization browser extensions. By lowering barriers preventing people from using outside tech like browser extensions or apps to monetize the data they generate on Facebook, Twitter or Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, rules requiring platforms to allow more interoperability could have important implications for firms building these tools and people who want to benefit more from the data they generate. Increased interoperability would help academic researchers whose tools have been kicked from social media platforms, too.

What about portability? I thought it was all about allowing people to transfer their photos and stuff.

That’s a big part of it, and one we hear most often from legislators who are worried about the stranglehold big tech platforms have on our digital lives and virtual assets. Consider data transfer — typically referred to as data portability — to be a subset of interoperability. Data portability is the sharing and movement of data. If forced to, platforms like Google might have to allow people to give consent to let another service access information associated with a friend’s shared location so people could see where friends are outside the Google Maps environment.

Aren’t there privacy concerns?

Indeed. “Interoperability is data sharing, and that has inherent privacy risks,” EFF staff technologist Bennett Cyphers told Digiday. He and others expect tech platforms to use privacy and security risks as a key argument against increased interoperability, which could be a red herring in some cases.

“There is a lot of space between those two ideas,” said Cyphers, who suggested that legislation that mandates increased interoperability could attach certain conditions that protect privacy, such as by requiring that data can only be transferred and employed for specific uses or not allowed for purposes not agreed to by people. In the end, he said, there could be improved privacy protections in place in the U.S. for certain personal data shared as a result of increased interoperability compared the limited protections for data gathered passively.