Hi Travis, welcome back to MarTech Series. Tell us about your COVID-19 business continuity plans at LiveRamp.

The recessionary environment brought on by the pandemic has forced marketers and publishers to do more with less, thus acting as a catalyst for accountability. As every marketing activity is further scrutinized, our customers are turning to LiveRamp to ensure every dollar spent is addressable and measurable. Further, they have entrusted us, and our technology, to help ensure their messages are reaching the right people, and resonating with them – all while driving meaningful ROI and outcomes.

By design, our Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) helps LiveRamp’s customers and partners maintain this necessary business continuity. It not only helps protect against industry disruption like the deprecation of third-party cookies and device identifiers, but can also be leveraged to unlock incremental revenue and deliver better results by ensuring every impression is transparent and measurable – all while maintaining interoperability and neutrality.

How do you collaborate now with your company peers, partners and customers?

We are focused on building a trusted ecosystem centered on transparency and consumer choice. In this version of the internet, which we feel is better for all stakeholders, we connect disparate first-party data sets from publisher to marketer with privacy and security at the core. We remain committed to working with any privacy-conscious partner in the AdTech industry so that marketers, via publishers, can leverage our identity infrastructure to transact at the person-level – enabling them to sustain critical workflows and capabilities, such as people-based personalization, frequency capping and audience suppression.

ATS set out to be an enabler of the trusted ecosystem and is already live across 25+ SSPs, 45+ DSPs and 150+ publishers, including 50% of the comScore top 50. Most recently, we partnered with Mediavine to integrate ATS into its Grow.me solution, which enables independent publishers to provide audience authentication through social shares, email opt-ins and other content curation features. With Grow.me, publishers can not only connect authenticated user data with advertiser demand in a privacy-first way, but also enhance revenue opportunities and improve bid values without the need for third-party cookies.

Your ATS is a powerful cookieless targeting solution. Tell us how it ingests data to ensure compliance with all the current regulations.

ATS is quite literally built on the concept of connecting consented, first-party publisher relationships with consented, first-party marketer relationships.

Accordingly, ATS requires a consumer to share their email address with a publisher in the U.S. Subsequently, in the E.U., we mandate publishers capture consent according to local regulation and be in compliance with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) v2.0 before running ATS.

Where is the Cookieless economy heading to in 2020-2021? Which trends and technology innovations would further disrupt the Cookie economy?

The cookieless economy is really already here – 40% of the internet today is cookieless. Historically, this has brought with it a host of negative implications (e.g., lower impressions). In response, we are working on making that inventory addressable where there is consented identity. Looking ahead, we believe the cookieless economy will continue to bifurcate into an authenticated, addressable web, and it will coexist with a web that also uses or is governed by things like Privacy Sandbox and contextual advertising. In other words, publishers will have access to both “flavors” of the next web.

That being said, the reason we’re focused on the former – the addressable web – is because we believe the more valuable inventory will be the authenticated addressable inventory, where users have consented first-party relationships with publishers. Lastly, we expect to see the continued reduction of device identifiers, like Apple’s Identity for Advertisers (IDFA) in the next several months. In its place, publishers and brands will prioritize consented, people-based identity, which we think will become the gold standard for addressability.

What is the future of publishing in the post-COVID-19 era especially with the growing security risks and privacy consent opt-in/outs?

We see a bright future for publishers, as long as publishers can find a way to establish trust and a clear value exchange with their users.

The open internet has an immense opportunity to thrive, and we are committed to ensuring the open internet can do just that. It’s essential. Further, if publishers are able to demonstrate the value of their content and experiences to users, they will be able to build trusted first-party consumer relationships that enable them to better compete with the large social platforms. To that end: publishers must “own” their destiny. The only way for them to do that is by “owning” and being accountable for their relationships with consumers. The moment publishers become dis-intermediated from their consumers – whether that’s through a device identifier, a third-party cookie or other means – they lose control.

We haven’t heard much about ad blocking tools in the last 2 years. What happened to them? Are they still relevant to the publishing industry?

It all comes back to the value exchange.

Research suggests that consumers are actually open and willing to receive personalized advertisements, if they feel they’ve engaged in a meaningful value exchange. We help publishers do that. In fact, we even rolled out a registration wall tool to help publishers collect authentications in a privacy- and consumer-first way.

Once again, we know that when a consumer gets ultimate transparency and control over their data, they are happy to receive advertisements customized to their preferences.

One piece of advice on Brand Safety to all publishers and advertisers, and how LiveRamp ATS can truly help them:

The beauty of ATS is that it is built on consented, first-party consumer relationships. Of course, brands still need to do their due diligence in evaluating and vetting the right publisher partners, but they have the assurance of people-based inventory. People-based inventory delivers better return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and lower cost per page view (CPPV), for example.

In fact, in a recent case study that we completed with Fitbit, the leading health and fitness brand saw 2x higher ROAS, a 34% reduction in CPPV, and increased average order value of 13%. Moreover, brands are less likely to uncover fraud when they buy inventory with a “true” consumer behind it. It’s a win-win across the board.

Thank you for answering all our questions!