True addressability must be omnichannel

True addressability must be omnichannel
Ben Cicchetti
Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Over the last few weeks, we have defined addressability and determined that an authenticated, or ‘known’ addressable audience is key to the success of publishers and other media owners. 

With an increased focus on authenticated audiences, brands are also considering how they can deliver more effective advertising against these audiences, through their own first-party data. But for advertisers to achieve marketing nirvana, they can not be limited to a single addressable audience, or even to a single channel, to maximise their campaign reach.

Display, video and audio addressability

Being able to identify prospects and customers across multiple channels and holistically plan ‘omnichannel’ marketing campaigns across them is the holy grail for marketers. 

Display

Authenticated addressability in display advertising has become an increased focus with the impending demise of third-party cookies. 

Where third-party cookies acted as a proxy for declared identity, publishers are now looking for authenticated alternatives. As a result, we are seeing more publishers implementing paywall and registration layers that enable them to collect declared identity for each of their users.

The authenticated audiences which media owners are building can enable them to future-proof their advertising sales businesses and protect against the deprecation of third party ID's. Those publishers without scaled authenticated audiences will struggle to sustain an advertising business if still dependent on cookies when Google Chrome shutters cross-site tracking in 2022.

Video

With over a billion smart TVs and OTT devices across the world, addressability across these platforms has never been more attractive to advertisers. Broadcasters are taking steps to take advantage of the personalisation and targeting that these audiences can deliver to marketers. 

Broadcasters are creating their own streaming services, with the vast majority requiring individuals to sign-in with an email address to access their unique content. Much like the walled gardens, they are then not only able to associate each user with a unique identifier (email address), they are able to recognise that individual across multiple devices. 

These authenticated addressable audiences are made available to advertisers to target their marketing campaigns across Connected TV audiences using the behavioural, demographic and interest-based attributes they collect. 

Audio

We are seeing audio addressability being achieved across music streaming services such as those provided by Spotify, Pandora and Apple, as well as across the burgeoning number of podcast platforms. 

Spotify provides a great example of how a scaled authenticated audience can be achieved as it requires every user to log-in to access their service across every device they want to use it on. As seen in the Connected TV sector, Spotify is able to associate each user with a unique identifier and recognise that user across multiple devices. 

Continuing the Spotify example, their addressable audience is the 153 million users of their free service. There is a clear value exchange taking place; Spotify users accept targeted advertising in exchange for free music streaming. This authenticated omnichannel audience can then be targeted by advertisers using the demographic and behavioural attributes that Spotify collect. 

An omnichannel approach to addressability

With each of these sectors building their addressable audiences, advertisers can begin to dream of a world where they can match their first-party data against each addressable audiences individually, and also across multiple addressable channels.

In the current third-party ID world, a holistic approach is harder to achieve. Each channel uses different unique/interoperable identifiers, whether it be a third-party cookie or device ID or something else. But with leading media owners beginning to move to PII based identifiers, a holistic approach is becoming viable...provided that some obvious but inevitable challenges can be overcome

Privacy-first approach to omnichannel addressability

Any time PII or Personal Data is used within the advertising ecosystem, it comes with significant privacy and compliance challenges. This is where InfoSum’s identity infrastructure comes into its own. 

InfoSum’s identity infrastructure enables first-party data and any authenticated addressable audience to be matched on PII, without either party having to share any personal data. Additionally, because we are entirely identity agnostic, advertisers and media owners are not limited to a single channel. They are able to identify and find their audiences wherever they exist.

Using the InfoSum platform, it is very straightforward for a brand to match its first-party customer data against both a broadcaster’s audience and a publisher's user base. They can identify the unique reach for each audience and the total unique audience across both to plan the most effective campaign across both channels.

Visit our Addressability page to explore this topic further, including the journey from unknown to known, the benefits it brings and InfoSum’s market breaking approach.

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