Today’s publishers are facing a rapid evolution in data, tech, and innovation in how advertising is bought and sold, and how it is measured. Data is now the critical tool for every stakeholder in the ecosystem, and tech and innovation will help distinguish the successful ones from the rest in today’s pressure-filled market.
Leveraging first-party data, and building a data collaboration-based identity strategy to extend the value of these insights, will be the difference-maker. Without identity to connect data in a privacy-centric way, publishers are in the dark as to who their visitors are, how to best personalize touchpoints and consumer relationships, as well as how to best monetize their audience and drive the best results for their businesses. But by building on this foundation, publishers are able to leverage authenticated audiences, not only to develop a first-party data strategy but also enhance it with third-party insights, and drive better monetization.
However, using identity to drive better business outcomes isn’t just a one-step process. Publishers should take a crawl, walk, run approach that allows them to not only build out a robust first-party data strategy, but then to collaborate on that data with partners to drive even better returns on their investment.
Authentication & inventory monetization
While we’ve discussed authentication at length previously, the first step for publishers to strengthen their businesses is to choose identity technology focused on authentications. Authenticated identity, which hinges on consumers choosing to share their information with the publisher to create first-party data, enables marketers to advertise to real people and better connect with them.
Enterprise identity for a post-cookie world
Building on authentications, an identity infrastructure will help publishers to better enable custom audiences across their portfolio of inventory. In addition to powering audiences for better monetization, it can unlock new revenue streams and make it possible to leverage first and third-party data, bringing additional insights to bear and improve targeting.
Implementing an enterprise identity solution helps publishers to build a single source of truth about each individual consumer, unifying all available data. Through deconflicted, unified views of customers, publishers can better understand individuals and households, helping marketers to maximize valuable audiences, thereby maximizing yield.
From there, enterprise identity solutions should also help publishers to work across the ecosystem. This means enabling consistent and persistent identity, so that segmentation stays intact from targeting to exposure to conversion, all the way through to measurement, showing marketers that their campaigns are driving impact. Furthermore, publishers’ enterprise identity should be interoperable, and deliver the audiences that marketers want regardless of the identifiers they’re working with.
Entry-level collaboration and insights
From there, publishers are ready to take advantage of a solution that’s at the top of everyone’s minds: data clean rooms. Clean rooms are a safe and neutral space for data collaboration and partnerships to exist without either party having access to the other’s data.
As companies get started with data collaboration through clean rooms, it’s critical to generate actionable insights and value across the business without delays. The right clean room solutions can help to do this by streamlining implementation and reducing time to value, fostering a quick transition to actionable insights and data-driven decisionmaking.
Building a foundation of identity in the first steps will help once a company starts collaborating via clean rooms. Linking identity to consumers’ personal information helps to ensure better clean room collaboration. When parties involved in data collaboration both share a foundation of identity, they’re able to leverage clean rooms while maintaining an accurate view of who their consumers are, and generate more valuable insights accordingly.
Full-scale, advanced data collaboration
Once publishers are well-versed in the foundational aspects of data collaboration, they can start to take advantage of the cutting-edge use cases to further optimize and measure marketing, and unlock consumer insights. This includes multi-party collaboration, which can enable benefits like layering data providers’ insights to help deliver more personalized, relevant, and effective advertising experiences.
Additionally, as the ecosystem starts to deploy generative AI in more strategic ways, data collaboration tools such as clean rooms can leverage generative AI to drive more value. Amidst the race to derive more insights, quicker, from data collaboration, generative AI can democratize insights so non-technical business users can use, and drive value from, data collaboration.
Moving forward
Data is setting the stage for transformative opportunities for publishers to amp their businesses up with data collaboration – but they must take the requisite first steps to reach the right outcomes. Just as a strong first-party data strategy is now the foundation for all the use cases of data-driven marketing that follow, publishers need a strong strategy, and proper planning, to build towards data collaboration and set themselves up for success.
To learn more about publishers leveraging LiveRamp for cutting-edge use cases, check out a replay of our webinar with Paramount and Circana.