This short paper for Ozone Identify was written as an entry for the 2022 awards season and focuses on why we have created this solution, how it benefits advertisers, publishers and consumers, and the results it has delivered.
Background
Imminent changes to Google’s Chrome browser will effectively end the use of third-party cookies in digital advertising. Brands and agencies need alternatives to efficiently run campaigns – these must deliver audience addressability, better targeting, frequency capping and measurement – while interoperating with existing systems.
As solutions – largely labelled as universal IDs – are launched, the industry is in danger of replacing one problematic issue with another. While change is essential for consumer privacy, it represents a clear conundrum here for marketers; GDPR and browser changes are largely occuring due to excessive tracking, which is at odds with marketer’s own interests.
In addition, most universal IDs need first-party data signals – much of these generated by premium publishers, who are reluctant to allow intermediary technology businesses to take control of the data assets created from their trusted relationships with readers.
The Big Idea
Our big idea was to change the conversation around identity and tracking by focusing product innovation on our unique offering – not creating a lookalike, shareable ID product to replace the flawed third-party cookie.
In Ozone Identify, we built a proprietary, easy-to-use and easy-to-integrate audience graph to meet the needs of all key stakeholders:
For advertisers, Ozone Identify, through greater addressability, allows them to reach previously unknown consumers, with the activation tools needed to deliver campaigns, all while respecting the rights of their target customer.
For consumers, Ozone Identify ensures their data never leaves the Ozone ecosystem, keeping privacy aligned to the permissions they grant the publisher. As an identifier, their data remains under publisher control at all times.
For publishers, Ozone Identify monetises their unknown consumers, while also significantly reducing data leakage. The latter occurs when intermediaries extract publisher data to create their own ad products to then compete with the publisher for advertising budgets, and yet pass very little, if any, value back to those publishers who create it.
Making it happen
At the heart of Ozone is a nationwide, cross-publisher view of reader consumption data that fuels our advertising platform. We have a unique and privileged first-party relationship with our publishing partners – this set the framework for the creation of Ozone Identify.
While simple in its definition, Ozone Identify is driven by an incredibly technical and complex audience graph, incorporating numerous unique publisher data signals, seen at unparalleled scale. These include:
First party cookies
Household data derived from the IP address
Consented user data from publisher (anonymised email hash, location data)
We built the audience graph using a tiered approach, incorporating deterministic data – like cookies – while layering on probabilistic data using machine learning clustering and lookalike algorithms. A huge amount of work is carried out to ensure this complexity translates into an easily usable identity graph that talks to advertisers’ existing systems.
As Ozone manages the identity graph on behalf of publishers, the data used by advertisers and their platforms always remains in publisher control:
The Ozone Identify audience graph can be expired by a publisher after a specified period – user data is only used for its intended purposes
The Ozone Identify audience graph can also be segmented by ad partner. This ensures an individual publisher’s data is only usable on their own website – eliminating the possibility of a buyer extracting audience insight from a publisher’s users and using that data to advertise to them on less premium websites.
Results
+77% increase in audience addressability: Ozone Identify’s success can arguably be demonstrated by this single data point. Where market-wide audience addressability through third-party cookies is currently 48%, Ozone Identify’s addressability is more than 75%. The combination of both means Ozone Identify allows advertisers to reach 85% of the UK, while total platform addressability reaches 100% with our contextual solutions.
Powers 65% of all impressions delivered: Recent analysis of active campaigns have shown 65% of all our publishers' impressions delivered using Ozone Identify. Across the past twelve months 983 campaigns – all of our premium managed service and deals activity – have been boosted with Ozone Identify.
+80% increase in publisher revenues: Ozone Identify allows publishers to monetise a greater proportion of their audience, positively changing their revenue profile. Revenue made from ad requests using Ozone Identify is +50% higher than even those with a cookie. The overall effect is that Ozone Identify increases publisher revenues by over 80%.
Reduced consumer data leakage: Longer term, Ozone Identify has a significant impact on reducing data leakage by removing user data from OpenRTB auctions. In months-long testing with two of our publishers, this also delivered further revenue increases of +42%.
While always in development, Ozone Identify is already forging new ground in maximising opportunity for both brands and publishers, while respecting consumer privacy in the online advertising ecosystem.