At this point, it’s not news that years of ongoing changes in data privacy regulation have created massive amounts of change in the way that data is being used (or not used) across the advertising industry.

As IAB Tech Lab CEO, Anthony Katsur, often says, “Just like energy, finance, or healthcare, advertising is now a regulated industry.” As part of this trend, publishers face challenges in creating sustainable revenue growth.

Navigating Data Privacy in Advertising

Whether it’s the continuing decline in ad revenue that digital publishers are grappling with or the never-ending struggle that the streaming television industry is having to reach profitability it’s clear that owners and publishers of media are feeling the effects of these changes.

One of the areas where these changes are most visible is within the publisher’s data technology stacks. Increasingly, publishers are centralizing the many data sources they need for monetization within their data warehouse. While this evolution brings the promise of insights and connectivity, publishers also need a purpose-built application layer to help them activate and get the most value from their data.

DMPs: From Central Role to Obsolescence

For years publishers relied on DMPs to be at the center of their monetization efforts. As cookie-based monetization becomes less and less dependable and publishers’ distribution channels continue to fragment outside of the web these systems have failed to develop new solutions for key functions like app and historical data collection, 2nd-party audience enrichment, and programmatic activation.

This leaves most legacy DMPs relegated to web-based data collection, audience segmentation, and simple ad-serving activation. Additionally, traditional DMPs were not built with important capabilities such as data clean rooms, identity resolution, and PETs which are extremely important in our privacy-centric world.

Data Warehouses: A New Hub for Monetization

Many DMPs have responded by integrating large data sets through mergers and acquisitions to help fill gaps around identity, some are playing catch up by trying to build more privacy-centric features like identity and clean rooms, and others have decided to completely go out of the business. A response to this lack of innovation by DMPs in recent years has been more organizations investing in their data warehouse to centralize their various audience data sources. The question is, is the data warehouse alone enough?

The Missing Piece: Purpose-Built Applications

As we talk to customers in the market it’s clear that they need applications that can work with their data warehouse to create efficiencies and grow their revenue. One of the biggest challenges is actually activating data.

Data warehouses often rely on applications and integration providers to make data more actionable which leaves publishers building expensive custom solutions and navigating complicated operations.

Similarly to how the Composable CDP movement has stepped up to help marketers evolve how they activate data in their warehouse, media owners and publishers (and new companies like retail media) need solutions that are purpose-built for both the era of privacy as well as ad monetization use cases.

Embracing the Future of Audience Monetization

Audience monetization platforms of the future need to be able to combine the streamlined audience building and activation (in both programmatic and direct)  that legacy DMPs relied on, while also allowing for more complex tasks like normalizing various data sources, running complex identity resolution models and collaborating within data clean rooms.

As free and scaled 3rd-party cookie data goes away the monetization is shifting to the publishers and media owners who are investing appropriately in their 1st-party-data, and there’s a major opportunity to create profitable growth. Investing in technology to help power this growth is crucial and will separate the winners from the losers during this period of change.

The post The Data Warehouse Has Replaced Many DMP Functions, but Is It Enough for Publisher Data Monetization? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Now publishers and advertisers alike are looking for a more reliable, privacy-friendly solution. One of the most promising options is identity or people-based marketing—a concept with a mature technological backbone in wide use today.

This playbook, created in partnership with Lotame, aims to illuminate the digital media space by diving into identity as a concept and explaining the wealth of advantages an identity-based individual ID offers brands and publishers. Fill out the form below to download your copy now!

Also check out the articles in The Identity Connection series. Article 1 on activating identity here; article 2 on buy-side post-cookie strategies here; and article 3 on creating a portfolio identity strategy is here.

The post AdMonsters Playbook: The Identity Connection appeared first on AdMonsters.

Are you panicking at the idea that the majority of your inventory will soon lack identifiers? Are you hyperventilating about digital publishers’ chances of survival?

Then you’ll want to grab one of the limited seats at AdMonsters’ 50th Publisher Forum in Santa Monica, Mar. 8-11.

Here are five sessions you don’t want to miss:

1. Monday Morning Keynote With Jamie Gutfreund

As strange as it may seem, the demise of the third-party tracking cookie—as well as other tumultuous industry shifts over the last few years—is not terrible for publishers.In fact, these major changes are presenting premium publishers great opportunities—in particular, the ability to cozy up to advertisers and serve as a guide for a landscape that’s transformed dramatically in the past few years. Using anecdotes from her long career on the buy-side, Monday Morning Jamie Gutfreund will show you just how to demonstrate your enhanced value with audience targeting, measurement, and insights to clients big and small.

2. Digital Media Drilldown With Jounce Media

Jounce Media’s research and predictions on the programmatic space have become quintessential reading for all digital advertising professionals. With a new report on “The State of the Open Internet” just released, the AdMonsters content team will grill Chris Kane about the bigger-picture consequences of Google’s cookie slaughter—consolidations, closings, courtships, oh my!

3. The Future of the DMP

OMG—without third-party tracking cookies, data management platforms are toast! Hold on there, partner—Lotame’s Adam Solomon will explain why the Chrome cookie dump is just part of a new chapter for DMPs, one in which they’ll become even more vital for publishers than before.

4. Let the Data Flow Throughout Your Organization

The exit of third-party tracking cookies calls for bold new strategies in data management—ones thinking beyond just the revenue department. Buzzfeed Director of Data Management, Josh Peters, shares his company’s experiences overhauling their data management program and its progress in building a circulatory system supplying multiple divisions outside revenue—think marketing and editorial—with actionable data insights.

5. Escaping CCPA Limbo

As if publishers didn’t have enough to worry about with the third-party cookie crumbling, more and more state governments are setting up data privacy laws faster than you can say “Consent.” Highest on every publisher’s mind is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, will start being enforced July 2020… and doesn’t actually have finalized text! Loeb & Loeb digital privacy legal expert Jessica B. Lee will help you figure out how to future-proof your tracking and data programs to ensure you’re respecting user privacy and staying on the right side of the law(s).

Of course, third-party cookie talk will permeate the entire agenda of the Publisher Forum—truth be told, there isn’t one session you want to miss!

The post The Big Google Cookie Crumble: 5 Sessions To Help You Prep appeared first on AdMonsters.

The email address is a digital passport. You need your email address to shop for goods (Amazon, eBay), to pay for them (Venmo), to coordinate that your packages won’t be stolen (UPS), to sign up for deals (newsletters), for social (FB, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok) and to escape it all with streaming services, where you may or may not see ads for more goods (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+). We don’t share our email login or inbox with anyone, thus it maintains the rarified position of a straight dart to identity across devices. 

Most people keep their personal email addresses forever. With all these considerations, it’s easy to understand why many see the email address as the key to the future of digital marketing and advertising. It can identify audiences cross-device and is people-based in nature. This key to identity and marketing to people is what makes the email hash so important to publishers and marketers. They need to reach known people in a privacy-safe way, and email is the best tool for doing so.

What Is the Email Hash?

The email hash is a 32-character code, unique to each email address. This code cannot be reversed, making it completely anonymous. 

How Does Email Hashing Work?

Hashing takes a piece of data, like an email address, and converts it to a 32-character hexadecimal string. Every time this email address is run through the hashing algorithm, the same result is delivered. What that means is that your email address, a unique value, is converted to a unique hash string through this process. Originally used as a security feature, the email hash is now a useful identifier that works across every marketing channel. 

For example – content@admonsters.com hashed would be: e3dc577c33efb0645a65e7ed4bc65f16

What Are the Benefits of Email Hashing?

Communicate with clients across all screens and devices: Unlike the cookie, which represents an anonymous user, the email address represents a known customer. It is unique to that individual and remains persistent across all devices, apps and browsers.

Respect client privacy, without sacrificing accuracy: By hashing, your customers’ email addresses are transformed into matching segments that can’t be readily used for mailing, respecting the rights of your partners and customers.

For more on email hashing, check out this video from LiveIntent.

The post What Is Email Hashing? appeared first on AdMonsters.

We’ve been covering the details of CCPA all of 2019, defining it, explaining it, breaking down its amendments, looking at how it impacts the emerging T/V market, and then we also looked at tools that can help with compliance, like IAB’s CCPA Compliance Framework, as well as ways in which a CMP or CDP can be used for compliance. We also worked on a Playbook with GeoEdge, outlining the relationship between privacy compliance and user experience and what that means for revenue teams. And then another Playbook we developed with LiveRamp focused on how to survive life in a world without cookies.

Plus, we talked with industry leaders at BritePool, Ogury, Sourcepoint, and 33Across about solutions for compliance and alternatives to reliance on the third-party cookie. Also, Myles Younger, Senior Director of Marketing at MightyHive drafted a blueprint for a bright future in a cookieless world.

Here’s a look back at AdMonster’s 2019 CCPA coverage:

What is CCPA?

Being GDPR compliant won’t necessarily mean that you’re CCPA compliant. Also, it won’t be enough to just have systems in place to comply with CCPA and not continuously ensure that your users’ data remains safe.

Overall, the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) defined in CCPA is much broader than what’s been outlined in GDPR—“information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.” This includes IP addresses, cookies, beacons, pixel tags, mobile ad identifiers, browsing history, search history, and geolocation data. Read more.

CCPA Is Confusing AF

Digital media is looking forward to another year of impending doom as a fresh piece of confounding privacy regulation hangs over the space. The CCPA, which will affect any company that touches the data of at least 50,000 Californians a year, is in the middle of a statewide hearing tour at the moment, and the cracks are increasingly showing in the reportedly hastily assembled piece of regulation (typos are reportedly rampant and legislative patches continue to be written). Read more.

CCPA Update: It’s the Final Countdown

We know not what the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will finally look like when it goes into effect January 1, 2020, but we do know that Silicon Valley heavyweights applied great pressure to revise it, there’s an industry solution for do-not-sell requests, and unfortunately, most US businesses are overwhelmingly unprepared for its debut. Read more.

Interrupting Regularly Scheduled Programming: Privacy Regulations and the Emerging T/V Ecosystem

Ad-supported T/V ‘s future relies on an emerging addressable advertising technology, ACR, that will dramatically change T/V advertising delivery, measurement and monetization.

Automated Content Recognition (ACR) allows both subscription providers (like Netflix, Disney+) and ad-supported T/V providers (like Hulu, YouTube) to capture viewing data on screen for smart TV owners, all of whom opt-in to have this and personal identification data shared when they set up their set’s internet access.

This opt-in often is accepted thinking it is permission for the TV manufacturer to use the data, but second-by-second ACR-captured viewing data matched to that device user will also be used by content providers who can sell the addressability to advertisers for a premium price. Read more.

What Problems Does the IAB’s CCPA Compliance Framework Solve?

In short, the IAB’s and IAB Tech Lab’s CCPA Compliance Framework (here called “the Framework”, although the IAB has provided a similar framework for GDPR) provides a set of tools and standards to help make it easier for publishers and their ad tech partners to comply with the CCPA’s requirements around the sale of PI. Read more.

What is a CMP?

Consent Management Platforms (CMP) have been cropping up rapidly in the wake of GDPR—(and soon CCPA)—as the tool du jour for aiding publishers in collecting and managing consumer consent and passing that data throughout the advertising ecosystem. Read more.

What is a CDP?

CDP might sound like another martech or adtech acronym that will make its way into obscurity, but in a post-GDPR world where first-party relationships will be vital to survival, the Consumer Data Platform (CDP) is the ultimate tool for true consumer or audience identity resolution. Read more.

AdMonsters Playbook: Aligning Regulatory Compliance & User Experience

In this playbook, developed in partnership with GeoEdge, we’ll dive into the details of GDPR and why best practices for compliance are also overall user experience and privacy concerns. We’ll also examine the ramifications of the California Consumer Privacy Act and movements toward regulation at the federal level. Finally, the playbook will tie privacy regulation compliance back to other revenue team user experience responsibilities, such as ad quality and malware prevention. Read more.

AdMonsters Playbook: Life Beyond Cookies

Rumors of the third-party cookie’s death have been greatly exaggerated for years, but recent regulatory developments and browser privacy efforts have upset the dominance of this digital identifier. GDPR, CCPA, and browser privacy initiatives are only the beginning of a wider movement around data privacy, but they paint a clear picture of the next generation of consumer expectations. This playbook, developed in partnership with LiveRamp, aims to show publishers how to not only survive without cookies but come out the other side more powerful than before. Read more.

Surviving the GDPR/CCPA Squeeze: Sourcepoint’s Ben Barokas on CMPs and Regulatory Compliance

Such is the publisher’s lot—as soon as you start feeling confident you’ve covered your bases on GDPR, you’re trying to prepare for whatever the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will look like (it’s still being revised). But are your bases really covered on GDPR—considering that the European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) are starting to dole out fines, like this €50 million shiner to Google?

We hit up Ben Barokas, veteran AdMonster as well as Founder and CEO of Sourcepoint, about recent GDPR developments, the looming CCPA, and the value of third-party CMPs versus homegrown efforts. Read more.

Portal to Privacy: 33Across on Complying With Current and Future Regulations

Publishers are frantically preparing for the launch of the California Consumer Privacy Act on Jan. 1, 2020—and trying not to lose sleep over the looming EU ePrivacy Directive updates. But they’re alone in that effort—programmatic intermediaries like 33Across have heard the data privacy call and are ensuring they not only complying with privacy regulations, but also applying consumer preferences in a speedy and efficient fashion. Read more.

Beyond Consent for Consent’s Sake: Ogury on Monetizing User Choice

As the digital privacy revolution grows stronger with the awakening of the California Consumer Privacy Act, gaining user consent weighs heavily on the minds of many publishers. But Ogury Co-CEO and Cofounder Thomas Pasquet argues that consent simply opens the vault door to the treasure chamber of user choice. That’s why Ogury offers publishers a consent management platform that also delivers user insights from across its network as well as monetization options. Read more.

CCPA: Costly Confusion for Publishers and Advertisers—A Conversation With David J. Moore, CEO, BritePool

We spoke with David J. Moore, CEO of Britepool—an identity solution company aimed at leveling the playing field for publishers to compete with the Walled Gardens with a focus on privacy compliance and the disappearing third-party cookie—to talk about what CCPA could mean for the future of programmatic advertising, as well as learn more about his company’s research on how consumers will behave under CCPA. We also talked about how a solution to identity will not only aid publishers with compliance but may enable them to survive and thrive the overall existential threats the industry currently faces. Read more.

A Future Bright and Cookieless

A crumbling cookie is making it harder to identify “User X” in ad server logs and know that User X saw ads around the web on Days 1 and 2, and then converted on Day 3. This blindness ravages user-based, deterministic attribution models. Impression, view-through, and conversion tracking all depend to some extent on third-party cookies.

Even if a cookieless future consisted of nothing more than incrementality tests and data clean rooms, advertisers would have years worth of new toys to master and traditional tactics to revisit. But the post-cookie technology and regulatory landscape is just now dawning, and we can look forward to a great deal of innovation. Read more.

The post AdMonsters Guide to CCPA appeared first on AdMonsters.

But as the main feeder exchanges settles at three—GAM, Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM), and Prebid—there’s a great deal more murkiness in the middle; even more cross-pollination as SSPs pine for advertiser spend and DSPs tighten their bonds with premium publishers.

The question of “how many intermediaries are actually necessary?” is ringing louder than ever, and to some extent SSPs and DSPs are trying to usurp each other’s positions as there may not be room for both parties.

The thing is, they should both squarely have their sights on pleasing publishers.

Brave New Cookieless World

We are fast exiting a programmatic world of chasing down third-party cookies. As privacy regulations like CCPA mount up, the browsers continue their merciless cookie crackdown, and users flock to cookieless environments like connected TV, publisher first-party data is going to be all the more valuable—namely intent and contextual data.

There isn’t really a third-party cookie replacement, but many privacy-friendly technologies that serve as a substitute: shared identifiers, identity solutions leveraging parallel paths (“sidecars”) to the exchanges, blockchain-based targeting, AI-powered behavioral targeting, contextual signals, etc.

The open programmatic ecosystem’s survival in the face of walled garden dominance requires buyers, sellers, and technology intermediaries to let a base line of identifying data flow between them. Those that can capitalize on nuances beyond the identity layer are the ones that will thrive.

Publishers will have the easiest time here as deciphering audience characteristics is central to both monetizing and delivering better user experience. It’s not their fault that advertisers have been too distracted by the abundance (and low price) of third-party cookies. But as those dry up, brands need publisher insights as targeting differentiators, and the right ad tech partners can help pubs highlight intent and contextual signals.

Google Tightens Its Grip on Pubs

Google seems to have seen the writing on the wall about publishers’ growing prominence. Its DSP DV360 is closing down its managed service offering and has ceded ground to The Trade Desk and Amazon’s DSP, according to an Advertising Perceptions survey. At the same time, Google has tightened its grip on publishers with its Open Bidding S2S connection and the Unified Auction.

The latter limits publishers’ flooring controls, injects a new rules regimen (unified pricing rules), and thereby complicates publisher attempts to manage demand outside of Google’s pipes. Is Open Bidding and the Unified Auction the long promised header-bidder killer? No—after the UA launch, some publishers reported better performance from their header wrappers.

But the point of these additional obstacles is to make publishers take a hard look at the opportunity cost of header revenue. Some will find the complexities of header setup—including additional skilled personnel and various point solutions for optimization—more valuable than others looking for a straightforward solution (ahem, Open Bidding and Unified Auction).

And the supply-side product executive shakeup of September 2019 suggests further consolidation of monetization services (think mobile), tightening the fist further. I also have a sneaking suspicion GAM will continue to limit pub access to data and portability options in the name of privacy.

Battle Royale: DSPs vs SSPs

It’s no secret DSPs can bypass SSPs if they have the right set up; for example, access to Google’s Open Bidding (at a price) or direct pub connections via the header. The Trade Desk gets this and has integrated into the PreBid.org continuum.When making further programmatic inroads with the buy side, PubForum Scottsdale attendees told me they were always speaking with DSP reps, not agency people.

SSPs who have been concentrating on their buy-side portfolios need to re-focus on the supply side. As Meredith’s Chip Schenk notes in a recent AdExchanger column, SSPs risk alienating prized pubs if they cozy up too far to the buy side. I can’t think of a worse time to sully your publisher relationships—DSPs are actively courting premium publishers, brands are waking up to the value of publisher data, and Google is doing its damnedest to make outside demand options inconvenient.

But… how do SSPs shine in a world where their very existence is increasingly pondered? High-value publisher solutions seems to be the best differentiator. Rubicon Project and PubMatic have built clever technology on top of PreBid that will potentially save pubs labor—and cash that would have gone to point solutions. OpenX has an identity product that gets around the dwindling relevance of cookies.

This should be a prime place for innovation—I think flexible placements could be huge. Imagine a page where the number of ad slots and formats available is determined in real time by both user preference and best revenue options. It’s not that far off.

Next year is bound to bring further consolidation among DSPs and SSPs, but it’s unlikely we’ll find out whether there’s enough room for both parties to exist. Ultimately, publishers will provide the answer to that question.

The post SSP and DSP Value Is in the Eye of the Publisher appeared first on AdMonsters.

That may have seemed like an interesting comment to make in front of a room full of publisher revenue specialists. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d say to pump up an audience development team.

But revenue teams these days are for more interested in audience development—as well as analytics and even editorial, all of which wormed their way into Publisher Forum Scottsdale conversations. The future of monetization requires thinking about audiences less as faceless users, cookied or not, and more as individuals. Anonymous individuals, of course, but ones with interests and intent.

Because guess what? With the collapse of the third-party cookie, that kind of information is about to be more valuable than ever. The opening keynote conversation with Goodway Group’s Amanda Martin alluded that buyers are already far more interested in contextual signals—especially in Europe, which might be a tasty preview of a post-privacy regulation United States. Joetta Gobell, VP of Research and Insights at Dotdash, illustrated how publishers can crunch contextual data and build intent segments for maximum gain.

And even on the privacy front—as CCPA and its Jan. 1, 2020, launch date loomed large over the conference—understanding the user as an individual is key. Working groups noted that CCPA offers the chance for publishers to evaluate the usefulness of all the third-party code running on sites, but also to open a dialogue with visitors about business models… And the possible expansion of those models: the tools are available to enable choice in how individuals compensate you for the content or other value you provide, whether that’s transacting with cash or data.

Looking back, the consumer data privacy crisis isn’t about people that hate personalized content or targeted advertising—it’s really been about the methods. So-called creepy ads chasing people as they venture across the Internet, thanks to surreptitiously placed trackers (and often dubiously amassed data).

Publisher Forum attendees didn’t seem all that worked up about the cookie apocalypse because they saw the opportunities, and potentially the end of cherry-picking RTB advertisers chasing third-party cookies. The solutions vying to replace cookies—including identity resolution, shared IDs, contextual targeting, and AI-based matching—honestly seem like better options for publishers, consumers… arguably even advertisers.

They also make more sense as a greater amount of ad spend hits the ultimate cookieless environment: connected television.

However, there is a gap created by the cookie’s downfall in third-party measurement for viewability, verification, and other metrics. Buyers and sellers alike are still waiting for agreeable, post-cookie solutions, but Martin did suggest that in a third-party data vacuum, advertisers would have to trust their publisher partners more—which I’m sure was relieving for many in the audience to hear.

Next Publisher Forum is in Santa Monica, March 8-11, 2020, but now’s the time to grab a season pass (or two… or three!) for your team. Learn more here!

The post PubForum Wrap-Up: An Internet of Individuals appeared first on AdMonsters.

Rumors of the third-party cookie’s death have been greatly exaggerated for years, but recent regulatory developments and browser privacy efforts have upset the dominance of  this digital identifier. GDPR, CCPA, and browser privacy initiatives are only the beginning of a wider movement around data privacy, but they paint a clear picture of the next generation of consumer expectations.

Much of the contemporary Internet—and certainly digital advertising—has been built upon tools for data transference. While the cookie has been key in the development of digital advertising and programmatic transactions in particular, the architecture is not going to collapse without it. Understanding why the third-party cookie has gone out of favor—or really, outlived its usefulness—illuminates what will replace it.

Download our playbook with LiveRamp on Life Beyond Cookies now!

Download Playbook

The post AdMonsters Playbook: Life Beyond Cookies appeared first on AdMonsters.