Hi, welcome to Martech Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about Permutive’s journey in the adtech industry. Can you tell us more about the vision for the company?

Permutive’s mission is to rebuild data in advertising to protect privacy. Our product vision is to empower publishers and advertisers to responsibly activate audiences to restore consumer trust.

What are your offerings? Which industries and geographies are you targeting to empower modern publishers and digital advertisers?

Permutive is an audience platform for publishers and advertisers.

We offer publishers the ability to connect with advertisers securely, plan with audience insights, and build privacy-safe cohorts. The result is that publishers are able to activate 100% of their audiences, across browsers and platforms, without exposing any data. Ultimately, this empowers publishers to protect revenue in a rapidly evolving privacy landscape.

We offer advertisers connections with premium publishers and the ability to reach target audiences with standard cohorts that share one audience definition across publishers. The result is that advertisers have a unified and privacy-safe point of access to reach full audiences with precision, scale, and transparency.

How is the US privacy landscape different from EU and rest of the world – any specific dimensions in this landscape that unify cross-border data privacy and security for audience data management?

What began with GDPR in the EU is slowly but surely taking hold in the US. Although respective European nations’ regulatory bodies may have differing approaches to enforcement, the EU has a more unified set of data-privacy laws, while the US has taken the approach of advocating for consumer privacy on a state-by-state basis, absent a federal law.

Between varying definitions of who the regulations apply to, who is protected under them, what information is protected, how opting in or opting out is regulated, and much more, these different regulations give organisations a lot to keep up with in order to remain compliant.

Further, businesses don’t have sufficient certainty as to how they can transfer personal data to the US. While the EU-US Data Privacy Framework has future potential to provide clarity around data transfer issues, the framework is likely to face challenges in the courts.

When we look at any individual piece of data privacy regulation, and certainly when taken as a whole, consumers are at the very centre of these discussions. Consumers’ desire to protect and restrict the use of their personal information for advertising purposes is what’s fueling the wave of regulations we’re seeing now. It then remains that whatever the future of data protection in the UK, EU, and US, adtech has a responsibility to create solutions that go beyond checking boxes of various regulations and focus on privacy-safe, first-party data solutions that truly honour customers’ sentiments around privacy.

You recently announced a major development related to first-party data for advertisers. Could you please tell us how this development would address different audience groups and impact advertising ROI?

We recently made several feature updates to our Audience Platform for Advertisers, including audience modelling, planning insights, and frequency controls.

These features are designed to help brands overcome the reachability problem. Due to consumer opt-out through mechanisms such as choosing cookie-blocked browsers, disabling cookies in Chrome, clicking “reject all cookies” when given the opportunity, and opting in to Apple’s ATT, brands can no longer reach 70% of the open web.

Our Audience Platform for Advertisers unlocks these consumers for a brand, allowing them to go from spending their budgets on 30% of the open web to reaching relevant consumers across the web, regardless of their opt-in status.

Tell us more about your efforts in providing transparency and efficiency for agencies. How would your recent collaboration with OpenX help publishers and advertisers?

Permutive’s partnership with OpenX strengthens the connection between publishers and advertisers by efficiently delivering addressable and scalable advertising inventory to buyers while allowing publishers to maintain control of and monetize their first-party data. The result is a streamlined, privacy-safe point of access to identify and reach audiences with precision and transparency at scale.

Additionally, Xandr, part of Microsoft Advertising, recently became the first buy- and sell-side platform to activate Permutive standard cohorts. Standard cohorts are interest-based audience segments that are generated automatically based on publishers’ first-party data and based on consistent and transparent audience definitions. This collaboration makes privacy-safe, scalable audiences directly available to buyers, enabling advertisers to quickly and reliably reach highly relevant users with one definition across publishers.

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Please tell us more about the different privacy laws that would impact the way companies like Permutive operate in the adtech space. What initiatives are you taking to manage the “US privacy front” in 2023?

2023 is a big year for privacy legislation in the US, with five laws coming into effect (or already in effect) at various times throughout the year: California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), The Colorado Privacy Act (CPA), The Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTPDA), The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), and The Utah Consumer Privacy Act (UCPA).  We also anticipate seeing more state privacy laws being drafted and moving through the US legislative process in 2023.

With five different states’ data privacy laws and a potential future federal data privacy law in the US, it’s important for adtech to move toward ways of buying and selling media that place respect for consumers’ data privacy at the heart of the solution. Rather than attempting to retrofit old ways of targeting consumers for new, varying, and evolving regulations, publishers, advertisers, and adtech need to work together to prioritise first-party data solutions in order to find sustainable success in this new privacy-forward environment.

Please elaborate on your audience building and contextual data management. How do brands use your platform to tackle the problem of decreasing consumer trust in advertising? 

We know that 74% of US and UK consumers are concerned about brands being able to view and track their online behaviour to target them with advertising. This decreasing trust is leading consumers to use the tools available to them to opt out of sharing their data for advertising, to the tune of 70%.

We help publishers unlock access to robust first-party data, including behavioural, contextual, and declared signals from their audiences. This enables publishers to safely address 100% of audiences, regardless of their opt-in status, whether they’re browsing in a hidden environment, or even if they’re passerby traffic.

We help advertisers continue to reach consumers with relevant advertising, even as addressability shrinks. For example, a global beverage CPG brand recently course-corrected over-indexing in Chrome to reach double the audience that was previously hidden in Safari. The campaign delivered 2.1x the number of impressions served in Safari vs Chrome, resulting in a 21% lower CPC and a 123% higher CTR compared to the benchmarks.

Tell us more about your digital marketing campaigns? What kind of results do you generate from your various initiatives that explain there is an urgent need to retain user trust?

Declining consumer trust in how personal data is used and the resulting user choice that follows are having profound effects across adtech. With this, we’re seeing publishers actively investing in first-party data strategies that protect their users and their data, safeguard revenue, and position themselves as strategic partners for advertisers.

Penske Media Corporation is an example of this, serving 70% of their impressions in 2022 with first-party data, and increasing revenue from first-party data by 46% in that same year. This allowed them to deliver their advertisers a 5x increase in performance (CTR) in campaigns that only used first-party data.

How can the whole advertising ecosystem quickly upgrade their “data privacy” gameplan – your predictions on the future of opt-outs and ad serving?

If we look at the trends, consumer opt-out is only going to continue to grow. With only 30% of the open web addressable today, this means this is a current problem, not a future problem. The most important part of the next phase of digital advertising will be consumer choice.

Publishers have a unique proximity to their audiences and are well positioned to seek consumer consent and activate rich first-party audiences. When advertisers build direct relationships with premium publishers, both parties are able to benefit directly from first-party, non-personally identifiable, and consented data. This next era of digital advertising will require publishers, advertisers, and adtech to collaborate to create more responsible ways of working, underpinned by respect for the consumer.

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