This year’s RampUp was the first truly worldwide, truly virtual, RampUp event we have ever done. As Warren Jenson – President of LiveRamp – put in his opening remarks: “We have over 5,000 individuals participating, in nearly 10 countries, representing more than 100 different companies.”
This inclusive, multinational event covered themes such as the rapid acceleration of digital transformation, the globalisation of the single view of the customer, and the unequivocal importance of trust and transparency.
In this blog we’ll be rounding up some of the highlights from the event. We’ll also be sharing links to the sessions so you can watch on-demand.
Register here for on-demand access to every session from RampUp Worldwide.
The changing nature of data collaboration
One of the big themes of the event was data partnerships, and how companies across industries are leveraging these relationships.
There were two sessions in particular that tackled this subject head on. In ‘Data Partnerships—How Brands are Better Together When it Comes to Data’ Ethné Twomey (Digital Integration Director, Phd Media UK) and Sepi Arani (Head of OEM UK, carwow) talked about improving visibility of buyer journeys and measuring campaign effectiveness.
While in ‘New Trends and Challenges in Securing Powerful Data Collaboration Relationships Between Retailers and CPGs to Enhance Customer Experiences’, Michel Bellanger (Director, Carrefour – Xperiences) discussed the changing nature of data partnerships:
“There’s a major shift in how data partnerships are being used. At first, data sharing was very focused on optimising the offer. What has changed in the last two years is data sharing being used to optimise demand.
“This part of marketing has historically been assumed by the brand to attract and retain consumers. But retailers now offer brands new tools and data to optimise their growth. Now because of data sharing platforms, we have the capability to deliver more value through activation.”
Michel went on to talk about how Carrefour uses its Xperience platform (built in partnership with LiveRamp) to connect the dots between its first-party data and data sets of brands and publishers to enable growth. Even going into detail about incorporating data about TV ads, and connecting offline and online identities.
All while keeping privacy and data security at the fore:
“If retailers and brands want to generate growth, the prerequisite is to design a customer-centric ecosystem that rethinks the value exchange. We need to distribute new and more visible benefits to our customers: transactional benefits, stronger relationships, and new services.”
Want to see for yourself? Watch the session on-demand now.
Addressability after the cookie
Of course a topic on everyone’s minds right now is addressability, or more specifically, how to maintain addressability with cookie deprecation and the shifting nature of device-based identification.
In his opening remarks, Warren highlighted how Fitbit, using LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), compared against a traditional, third-party cookie method. In the experiment Fitbit discovered they achieved 200% higher ROAS with ATS.
But diving a little deeper into the how, David Hayter (Head of digital at The Stylist Group) sat down with our own Simon Burgess (Head of Publisher Strategy, UK) to discuss ‘How to Maintain Addressability with LiveRamp Identity Solutions’.
David was the first to admit that, as their foray into digital is relatively recent, they didn’t have the issues of inheriting old technology and ways of working that publishers with a more established digital presence would have.
In fact, because they started making their digital plans in the infancy of GDPR and with the rumblings of Safari’s third-party cookie ban in the background, they made strategic moves about their data usage that means they’re a little better insulated against today’s issues than many other publishers.
But in talking about identity and addressability in place of cookie or device-based identifiers, David explained how his team had to make some fairly significant organisational changes to deliver a service that would meet their customers’ expectations.
“For a while addressability sat firmly within our email team. Our addressable products were really Stylist Loves and Stylist Daily. Over the last 12 months it’s moved to within the digital team. One of the things we’ve always struggled with at Stylist is because it’s a free magazine, there’s a question about whether users would pay for the content online.”
So in order to gain an authenticated identifier, David and his team needed to come up with a value exchange that worked for their specific customers:
“On the first Thursday of lockdown we randomly had the thought that if we decoupled the sign-in mechanism from getting people to pay for content that it became a fair exchange. To me, it always felt like if I gave you an email address and money, and you give me content, that doesn’t feel very fair.
“Whereas,” David continued, “if I give you my email address and you give me something that doesn’t cost you very much, that seems much fairer. For us, that’s recommending content which doesn’t cost us a great deal, but has an intrinsic value to that user.”
He goes on to talk about the ways that the decoupled payment mechanism can then be used for access to paid-for content or specialist events.
Want to hear more from this session? Watch it on demand now.
And David wasn’t the only publisher talking about revenue models. In ‘How Publishers Continue to Build Sustainable Revenue Models’ we had speakers from The Telegraph, Italia Online, Sapo and Index Exchange all discuss how to prepare for a financially successful future.
Watch the whole session for yourself now.
And believe it or not, that’s just a little taste from a handful of sessions. RampUp Worldwide Virtual Summit showcased over 60 sessions in over seven different languages and 10 different countries. For the full run down of every session from every country, register for the on-demand experience and start watching right away: