This month, LiveRamp’s Travis Clinger participated in ATS London’s roundtable discussing ‘The New Rules of the Road – Beyond Personalised Advertising’. Facilitated by Linsday Rowntree, Director of Operations at ExchangeWire, Travis was joined onstage by Isabelle Baas, Managing Partner at Starcom UK, Tom Obafemi, Performance Media at Lean Digital and Steve Pereira, President UK at Captify.
With infrastructure within our industry becoming more regulated, advertisers have a difficult task on their hands to uphold direct, personalised marketing. In this panel discussion, the guests reflected on some of the biggest changes the industry has faced, and where the ad-tech ecosystem is heading.
People-based marketing
As we enter a new phase of identity, murky and opaque advertising tactics are no longer accepted. As an industry we did explain the value exchange of advertising to consumers and that has, understandably, had a negative impact on consumer willingness to share their data.
In response to this, Travis outlined how “the number one thing we hear from clients is: how can we restore trust with the consumer following third-party cookies?” Indeed, with a bigger focus on consumer privacy, we’re seeing the industry pivot away from viewing the end user as just a device Steve Pereira at Captify added, “What’s happening with privacy and what’s happened in the pandemic, it’s all becoming very humanised… we’re really starting to put people and consumers at the forefront of everything that we do.”
Addressable audiences
This focus towards trust, personalisation and privacy may at first seem difficult. However, it is possible to engage consumers through personalised ads, while restoring the trust of the internet user using addressable, people based tactics. Steve Pereira from Captify outlined that publishers, in particular, “are in a prime position to have a pool of addressable audiences that they can match with marketers”.
Addressability flows from first-party relationships in which a value exchange is communicated. It creates robust, privacy-first, first-party data which is willingly shared by customers, giving brands a real competitive advantage over their rivals. During the session, Travis outlined how a lot of the conversations he’s having “now look at how we can use identity to make the best consumer experience”. This means that brands and publishers need to shift away from asking “How can I get this user to share their data?” to “How can I help this user and provide a tailored experience every step of the way?”
Learning from the walled gardens
One area of the internet which already does this well is the walled gardens, and the open internet can learn a lot from their ability to create rich first-party data, while communicating a value exchange.
In the UK, walled gardens take 80% of ad spend. However, Travis outlined that the time internet users spend between the open internet and the walled gardens actually makes up a 50/50 split.
It’s therefore vital that publishers seize their opportunity to rebalance this ad spend, especially following third-party cookie deprecation, as they now have the opportunity to monetise their inventories with the same technologies that have been leveraged by the social platforms. For years, publishers have worked to gain advertising dollars and now there’s a real opportunity for publishers to create rich data sets through sophisticated audience intelligence, all while restoring consumer trust.
The appetite for addressable, people-based targeting solutions has never been greater.