Month: January 2023

Our conversation will feature a specially selected roster of panelists including Rise’s CRO Chen Shalit, each putting an expert eye on trends, evolving opportunities for publishers and how programmatic is shaping the publisher conversation in the coming year.

Join this special preview panel and learn more about:

• Publisher revenue, data, needs and challenges in 2023
• Evolving tactics for publishers building video, CTV and audio campaigns
• How programmatic is unlocking new placements, auctions and other revenue opportunities
• Publisher measurement and analytics trends 
• Programmatic roles for first-party data and contextual strategies

After the discussion, stay for a cocktail reception and a chance to chat with our panelists and fellow attendees. Get a jump on the most critical topics for publishers and get ready for a year of growth — apply now for your seat at the Digiday Publishing Summit Preview.

With the exponential growth of mobile advertising, brands are also increasingly seeking transparency from the many vendors they work with, including DSPs.

SMADEX’s founder and CEO, Jordi de los Pinos, recently spoke with Eric Seufert, general partner at Heracles Capital, about how transparency has become more relevant to mobile programmatic, especially given recent changes in the digital advertising industry around privacy and first-party data. With digital advertising primed for more regulations and facing more scrutiny, advertisers are also giving their partners a closer look and seeking more transparency and collaboration.

“Companies are going to be dedicating more resources to understanding how programmatic works and how to leverage the information they have in-house and mixing it with information that platforms like ours have to make campaigns work better,” de los Pinos said. “I think that can only happen in a transparent environment.”

Advertisers are seeking more insights into programmatic

It is common for advertisers to work with multiple DSPs to achieve the scale they need for their programmatic efforts. Mobile DSPs such as SMADEX use algorithms to participate in real-time bidding for ads geared toward user acquisition, driving actions such as app downloads.

According to de los Pinos, however, many DSPs opt for an approach that obfuscates their tactics from their clients.

“Black boxes used to rely a lot on their knowledge of users that they could target,” de los Pinos said. “In programmatic, you have access to a lot of data — every impression that you buy, you know a lot of things about that impression.

“I know it’s fairly controversial, and there are a lot of people very concerned about the kind of data that companies like us have access to,” he added. “But if you’re transparent with advertisers about what kind of data you have and how you use it, there’s a lot that you can do to make programmatic better for everyone in the ecosystem, including the end users.” 

How SMADEX is collaborating with clients for better solutions

Transparency benefits both DSPs and advertisers in de los Pinos’ experience. In addition to helping limit fraud, being transparent allows SMADEX to better collaborate with clients on campaigns by sharing more detailed information about their data and reporting. This includes sharing how the platform uses advertisers’ first-party data, the segments it produces and how algorithms use that data.

“Advertisers like that we’re transparent, and they can discuss strategies with us,” de los Pinos explained. “We’re not shy of telling them how we would approach their campaign objectives.

“We also have clients that have their data science teams engaged with ours, and we develop ad hoc algorithms with them based on the information that they know and the permissions that we have,” he said. “That applies to everything: to contextual algorithms to audiences that can be applied in Android and iOS.”

This collaboration between advertisers and DSPs has become more critical amid continued changes in the digital advertising landscape.

“In the end, programmatic advertising is a lot about the data,” de los Pinos said. “It’s about using data to meet your advertising objectives.”

To learn more about transparency and mobile programmatic, listen to more of the conversation between Marketecture and Jordi de los Pinos here.

The demand-side platform proposes that advertisers upload their first-party data to Galileo to target their desired audiences on “the open internet” with Unified ID 2.0, or “UID2,” serving as the fulcrum of the offering.

Galileo appears to be a tonic to the mounting headaches of advertisers concerned as to how they can maintain their online audience targeting after Google Chrome retires its use of third-party cookies next year.

In theory, such convenience will attract advertisers in sufficient numbers that publishers, a key constituency in the Galileo audience-matching proposal, will find UID2 compelling but some still require convincing.

What is Galileo, and how does it work?

A key selling point of Galileo, which helps advertisers match their first-party data with comparable datasets elsewhere on the internet, is that it helps ease the headaches involved with matching different audience types using different technologies. This is because it offers “direct onboarding integrations” with all major customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platforms (CDP), plus data and clean room providers.

The Trade Desk’s chief strategy officer, Samantha Jacobson detailed how it aims to assuage advertisers’ fragmentation concerns after the sun sets on third-party cookies. This is because Galileo has direct integrations with CRM, CDP, and cleanroom providers, including Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Habu, InfoSum, LiveRamp, Salesforce, and Snowflake. 

UID2, one of a host of different ‘audience IDs’ supported by Galileo, and is at the core of the latest offering given that it uses email addresses submitted by audience members use to register with media outlets.

Publishers can then use hashed versions of these email addresses to generate a UID2 which is then used to cross-reference with advertisers’ email data, which is similarly hashed, to identify mutually-relevant audiences. From here, media traders can start negotiating deals.

Buyers love it, but publishers …

In recent weeks and months, The Trade Desk has won over some of the industry’s largest broadcasters to UID2 with Disney and Paramount agreeing to use the audience matching tool, but others (particularly legacy publishers) are not as easily convinced.

More than 50 North American media owners have gone live with UID2, opening up their advertisers to an addressable base of more than 3 billion devices using this targeting methodology, according to The Trade Desk, which has previously said it is working with Vox and The Washington Post.

UID2 has received buy-in from the industry’s buy-side — a constituency where star names such as Procter & Gamble have given UID2 their approval — meaning adoption of Galileo would, on the fact of things, appear to be a no-brainer.

However, some are reticent about feeding their first-party to an industry-wide solution that could potentially drive ad spend away from their coffers, and onto the long tail of the internet. Although, speaking with Digiday, Jacobson countered this assertion, adding that involvement with UID2 did not require participation in “some sort of co-op where they’re contributing their data for use by others.”

She further emphasized the collective “open internet” ethos whereby smaller companies battle Big Tech for ad spend. Jacobson added, “There are very few ecosystems that are large enough to be walled gardens on their own… I certainly don’t know of a journalistic outlet that is large enough to be able to maintain a separate line item on an advertiser’s budget.”

‘Everyone is trying to hedge their bets’

Representatives of publisher-focused trade orgs, including the Association of Online Publishers, Digital Content Next, and Prebid.org, were unable to respond to Digiday’s inquiries over their members’ attitudes UID2 by press time.

The past 18-month period has seen The Trade Desk attempt to (effectively) hand over the governorship UID2, only to be rebutted by the leadership of such trade orgs — such is the politicking that is taking place in the industry as the erosion of traditional targeting efforts continues.

However, a senior source at a large publisher noted while The Trade Desk’s efforts to lobby this constituency have been met positively in recent weeks, such players often have diverging motivations.

“Everyone is trying to hedge their bets,” added the source, who requested anonymity as they were not cleared to speak with press. “There’s a lot of mixed feelings about UID2, and part of that is the desire to have more direct business with advertisers… but at the same time, The Trade Desk is a significant player.”

Meanwhile, Ratko Vidakovic, founder of consultancy outfit AdProfs, noted how “the publisher-side is the crucial component” if Galileo’s rollout is to find success, as UID2s represent a crucial part of its audience matching proposal.

“Without it, the whole scheme falls apart,” he noted, adding, “I think the fact that Google Chrome delayed third-party depreciation by a year or two didn’t do UID2, or any other deterministic ID solution, any favors [in terms of adoption]… I think it’s removed any urgency from a lot of publishers’ efforts to implement logged-in user strategies.”

Speaking separately, Ameet Shah a partner at Prohaska Consulting, noted the urgency required, even if many in the publishing sector have pressing concerns over how to deploy resources in the mouth of a prolonged economic downturn.

“I think publishers need to experiment and determine what’s best for them,” he added, “it’s still the Wild West in terms of all things identity… it’s unknown if things like Seller-Defined Audiences will get any traction, I think many will have to experiment with as many identity partners as they can.”

Lurking competition

Reaction to Galileo at CES is likely to represent a critical milestone in how The Trade Desk’s 2023 playbook will develop with sources telling Digiday the DSP’s pitch will face competition from commercial foes and regulators alike.

Several publisher-side sources told Digiday that Amazon, arguably the most ascendant player in the advertising landscape, has been courting media players for meetings over the next few days in Las Vegas. Similarly, Google (whose PAIR initiative was likened to Galileo by several sources) has been lobbying for advertisers’ attention in recent weeks.  

However, Galileo and UID2’s biggest challenge is arguably present further afield, as data protection authorities increasingly bare their teeth, especially in the EU. For example, ahead of CES’ official opening, Meta received a significant body blow in the guise of a €400 million fine (that’s close to $425 million) from Coimisiún um Chosaint Sonraí – Ireland’s Data Protection Commission which effectively polices GDPR compliance by the industry’s Big Tech players.

Some wonder if such a ruling could have a domino effect on independent ad tech providers – after all, privacy concerns have impacted UID2’s EU rollout — with the ruling likely to underpin any such pitches in this year’s CES conference halls.