Ad tech pulls media into data clean rooms as brands demand transparency

Publishers and retail media players are increasingly embracing data clean rooms to help brands gain clearer insights into ad performance. At the same time, data and ad tech providers are stepping in to bridge the gap between media companies and advertisers, making clean room adoption more seamless. On Tuesday, LiveRamp introduced a new offering that enables brands, including Hill’s Pet Nutrition, to measure ad impact across connected TV, retail media and other channels, breaking down longstanding barriers that have limited cross-platform visibility for advertisers. LiveRamp’s data collaboration advance, which it called “cross-media intelligence,” was made possible by a new willingness among publishers to open up data for comparison against other publishers within its clean room. A clean room is a secure computing space where brands and publishers can basically lay their cards on the table without revealing their hand to the other party, or anyone else. In LiveRamp’s new cross-media measurement product, brands can see data across multiple publishers, a power that Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a specialty pet food brand owned by Colgate-Palmolive Co., is using to help devise its advertising plans. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Prior to the new service, LiveRamp had capabilities for brands to measure one-to-one with publishers, but not really connect them across the ecosystem. Publishers, however, are waking up to the fact that they need to provide some transparency for comparison to other channels to keep brands happy and to combat fragmentation in digital media, according to Daniella Harkins, LiveRamp’s senior VP of go-to-market. LiveRamp is hosting its annual RampUp conference this week in San Francisco, where it plans to introduce the new cross-measurement options. “We can break down some of those pillars, and we can give you those insights across publishers,” Harkins said. Clean rooms haven’t solved all measurement issues, but the more publishers that participate the more information a brand gets to understand where best to point its ad spending. That’s how Hill’s Pet views the new cross-media measurement offering, especially with its need to analyze retail media, said Joe Keating, senior analytics director at Hill’s Pet Nutrition. The specialty pet food brand sells mostly on Amazon, Chewy, Petco and PetSmart. “We’re in a position where we’re spending over $100 million on retail media,” Keating said. Retail media is a growing segment of advertisers’ playbooks, and while brands spend more marketing money with retailers, they’re not always getting a fine grasp of the value proposition. “Our message for the publishers, whether it’s a walled garden or not, is don’t try and push us too hard to set targets for what we’re going to spend with you,” Keating said. “If you can collaborate with us, if we can find the right role and fit for our spend with you, and we’re seeing it working, you’ll see our spend increase.” Read more: 8 of the best retail media strategies of 2024 Working within LiveRamp, Hill’s Pet is trying to gauge how its media strategy overlaps with retailers, which often run campaigns alongside its advertising on similar channels, including social media and connected TV. The clean room environment helps the brand study where its ad spend could bolster the overall media plan, which includes the retailers, and identify the best audience. “We’re now in a position where 100% of our audiences are created in the clean room and then pushed out to different publishers,” Keating said. Hill’s Pet has discovered that while retailers are sending lower-funnel messages on behalf of the brand, ads that target immediate sales goals, the brand can then set campaigns with longer time horizons geared toward developing brand loyalty, Keating said. For years, brands have been using data clean rooms to identify new potential consumers and track the effectiveness of their media spending. Streaming TV giants and retail media networks have been coming to the clean room table to help brands match their customers to viewership. Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Roku have all developed platforms to make use of their first-party data. Amazon has a data collaboration service within its Amazon Web Services cloud division. Google has its Ads Data Hub, which provides similar data playsets. The rise of data clean rooms coincided with shifts in consumer privacy expectations and regulations governing how brands and publishers could collect and share customer information. For instance, third-party cookies, the online trackers, have been slowly dropping from circulation, barred from browsers such as Apple’s Safari and getting new restrictions on Google’s Chrome. These forces have moved data platforms such as LiveRamp to devise new identity products and safer ways of connecting consumers to brands online. Last year, LiveRamp bought Habu, a high-profile data clean room company. Publishers have come to the clean rooms cautiously, too, not wanting to divulge too much information about their viewers and readers. But that’s changing, according to David Porter, head of advertising sales research, data and insights at Warner Bros. Discovery. Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery joined Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform, a product that launched last year with NBCUniversal and is starting to attract more media companies. Last week, Adobe made the collaboration platform available widely to brands, which can sync their data up to publishers and target audiences more accurately, according to Nina Caruso, senior product marketing manager for Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform. What sold Warner Bros. Discovery on joining Adobe was the fact that it could still control the data that gets seen by the advertiser, Porter said. Adobe’s platform takes the audience segments they build and immediately send them to ad markets to inform their digital media, hence the “real-time” in Adobe’s product name. “It enables brands to work with publishers of their choosing to discover, activate, measure audiences across all different channels, including connected TV, retail and commerce, media, digital audio and more,” Caruso said. Adobe also uses a technology that doesn’t require the transfer of data from a brand or media entity’s servers, Caruso said. “We’re kind of scanning data at the source, where it resides, and then helping to deliver instant insights around audiences,” Caruso said. Over the past few months, WBD has been testing Adobe’s data tech and said it helped increase match rates between advertisers and viewers. WBD gets 3.2 times more targetable identities compared to other matching methods, Porter said. “So that just means significantly more scale for the marketer and, quite frankly, more impact for their media campaigns,” Porter said.

Ad tech pulls media into data clean rooms as brands demand transparency

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