#8: Audience Targeting Job-to-be-Done
Join our Quo Vadis webinar interview with LiveRamp and Index Exchange on audience targeting + Deal IDs + CAIDs + more.
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Quo Vadis Use Case Education Session
April 13 at 12pm ET with LiveRamp & Index Exchange
Guess what? Just because 3rd party cookies are gone does not mean the advertiser’s appetite for audience targeting has gone away with it. Far from it.
As it turns out, advertisers don’t need cookies to get the audience targeting job done. What they want are targeted ads. That’s the actual job they want to get done and there are many ways to do it.
How that job gets done tomorrow vs. next year is causing a lot of angst up and down the supply chain. Since wading through identity alternatives can be overwhelming, Quo Vadis is here to help!
Join our Use Case Education Session on April 13 at noon ET where we’ll dig into a few of the most pressing identity problems and solutions with LiveRamp and Index Exchange. Keep reading on to see a few fun frameworks will be chatting about.
You don’t need a microwave to heat leftovers. You need to heat leftovers.
You don’t need a microwave to heat your food, you just need to heat it. That’s the job you’re trying to get done.
And just like programmatic — e.g. one advertising tool amongst many to get the job done) — you want the best outcomes like safety, speed, quality, cost-efficiency, etc.
The same goes for the hottest topic du jour — audience targeting. It turns out that marketers don’t need 3rd party cookies to run audience targeting, they just want to get the audience targeting job done safely, quickly, with quality, and cost-efficiently.
The Challenge
Audience targeting got a lot more difficult when Google said they would no longer allow outside identifiers on DV360. While other DSPs are open for business using any identifier in the bid stream, Google is shutting the door.
For example, when DV360 gets a bid request that contains a non-Google ID, it’s like getting no identifier at all. Looking across all DSPs and various ID solutions, advertisers end up with three possible outcomes. So, for advertisers and their agencies who rely on DV360 for media spend, and also want identity independence, they’ll need a workaround until all the dust settles.
At face value, this DV360 issue presents a giant problem for advertisers who need audience targeting to work on all DSPs with any identifier of their choice. Here’s why:
DSPs:
Google’s DV360 is the biggest DSP player by a long shot. According to WSJ, DV360 has a 40% market share.
The TradeDesk is the largest non-Walled Garden player with 10% (Quo Vadis estimate) with $4.2 billion in ad budget flowing through its pipes, so the total open web programmatic market size is ~$40 billion — give or take.
Amazon’s DSP falls somewhere in between with a 13% share (Quo Vadis estimates $6.5B in ad budget flows based on its 2020 10K), leaving 39% for every other DSP to fight over.
SSPs: As you can imagine, many programmatic rivers tend to meander into Google’s own SSP, known on the street as “AdX”.
Google’s 2020 10K says they did $23B in what they call “Google Network Members' properties” revenue, which is primarily DV360 and AdX (inclusive of GDN).
If DV360 runs $16 billion in ad budget, and if we assume around 75% goes to its own AdX ($12 billion), that means all the other DSPs including Amazon also tap AdX supply to the tune of $11B.
Frenemies: According to our estimates, all the other DSPs competing with DV360 for market share end up directing ~45% of their hard-fought budgets to Google AdX. If that’s not a case study in what Ken Auletta calls “Frenemies”, then we don’t know what is!
Reality Sets In: So, when Google said they would not allow outside identifiers inside the bid stream, you can see why everyone got a little nervous about autonomy on open web audience targeting.
Workaround Solution: Advertisers and agencies have been working with Deal IDs for a few years now and they provide a simple solution to the DV360 roadblock. As long as the Deal IDs are loaded with 1st party IDs from pretty much any provider, and exposed in DV360 or any other DSP, audience targeting will work. This is one of the important subjects will cover in our Education Session on April 13.
Brief History of Programmatic Audience Targeting
Since the beginning of programmatic time, when an SSP sends a bid request to a DSP, the DSP is designed to ask a quintessential question: “Can I recognize this 3rd party cookie ID?”
If so, then bid. If not, then don’t bid. That’s why they call it “audience targeting.”
3 Eras of the Quintessential Question
Looking back to the beginning of programmatic in 2007 to the present time, Quo Vadis sees three eras delineated by the ability to answer the question.
As we approach Google’s 2022 deadline — with regulatory pressures and political positioning playing out like a horror movie where fear and safety come out from the edges — advertisers are seeking ways to reframe the quintessential question and look to get a better answer than cookies could ever provide.
The New Question
Advertiser 1st Party Data
Unlike the past where various supply chain actors handled all the heavy lifting for audience targeting to work, the future state is dependent on advertisers having their own 1st party data.
That means advertisers are getting a crash course in 1st party data capture, growth, refinement, management, and usage. If they’re thinking about this giant challenge like Sean Ellis — the “Godfather of Growth Hacking” — then they’re off tothe right start.
How can a marketer know?
Have you set a goal for how many 1st party IDs you want to capture?
Have a you set time frame to reach that goal?
Do you have an “extensible” system/tools to capture, store and use IDs?
How many “growth hacks” have you tried in the last 6 months to capture and grow new IDs? If less than 100 then you’re not trying very hard!
Do you, or does your agency partner, know what a Bass Model is about it? If so, what does your Bass curve look like when it comes to reaching the goal?
If you don’t have good answers to these questions, then you’re in trouble.
Education Session Details:
Quo Vadis Host: Tom Triscari (CEO, Lemonade Projects)
Guests:
Travis Clinger from LiveRamp
Lindsey Bridgham from Index Exchange.
Topics:
We’ll start by framing the core use case and then walk you through how to run it successfully time and again.
We’ll dig into using 1st party identifiers in private marketplace Deal IDs.
Touch on Deal ID automation techniques to turn all the manual work into more productivity — it’s a quick-win solution that works with any DSP. Yes, Deal ID curation is still very manual work today.