The times, they are a'changin'
The battle lines are being drawn; our digital advertising ecosystem is the theatre of war, and we have several groups of interested parties fighting to control it. On one side – advertisers, publishers, adtech vendors; on another, regulators, government, tax coffers – and Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple? They each have their own viewpoint. Caught in the middle of all this small arms fire, heavier artillery and barrage bombs? Us - the humble internet user.
To explain – the internet has mostly been built such that ‘content is free, paid for by advertising’. Just as we thought that the shifting bedrock of cookies upon which the $330bn a year digital advertising ecosystem (2019 figure, as estimated by Statista) rests was being slowly eroded – it seems that the slow erosion has sped rather quickly past the point of no return.
Cookies are small files which sit on your PC or Mac, or similar internet-connected device – onto which organisations like your bank or ecommerce retailer stores small pieces of information pertaining to your past use so that, for instance, logging in to your online bank only requires a 3-field form, not a 42-field one. Or when you do your online shop, your past purchase history is easily retrievable so that the site can suggest what you may want to buy, based on your past purchases and those with similar purchase patterns to you. So far, so useful.
Cookies also started being used to track how you respond to advertising, and an entire economy grew from the recording - and trading - of such data, so that you should see ads which are more relevant to you, based on your past behaviours and the behaviours of those who behave similarly to you. A friend once asked me why he only ever saw ads for laser eye surgery and porn - after i stopped laughing (his eyesight is bad, and i’ve often speculated on what he does in his ‘alone time’) i asked him if he ever deleted his cookies; ‘yeah, every week’ was his answer; ‘That’s why you see irrelevant ads’ was my response.
The data stored on cookies helps advertisers serve the most relevant ad to the most relevant people in the most relevant place and at the most relevant time - minimising budget spent advertising products to people who won’t want them (e.g. stairlifts for able-bodied kids or luxury hols to those who won’t take them) and maximising ad revenue for publishers, so they can continue to produce compelling content for users. As an industry, we had done something rather presumptuous - to keep the internet free, we effectively bought and sold the users - without asking their permission. We didn’t start with that intention, but that’s where we got to - until the likes of Google started to change the way these things can work, perhaps in response to the implied threat of Government regulation or cuts in ad spend from the world’s biggest advertisers.
Further to the January announcement by Google that ‘at some point in the future, Chrome would no longer accept 3rd-party cookies’, Apple recently announced it would increase the use of consent screens anytime an App was transferring data from an Apple phone, like location and IDFA (“Identifier for Advertisers” a user-deletable number Apple assigns to your phone that app developers pass to advertisers when you are using ad-supported Apps on your Apple produced phone). These consent screens mean the interruptive messages that pop up on web pages asking for your consent regarding the sharing of advertising data will soon pop up all over the apps you use. It is anticipated that Apple will soon prevent Apple phones from transmitting IDFA at all, which will eliminate the ability for many advertisers to identify users, and serve them the most relevant ads.
So what does the future hold? Will people pay for content which they’re used to getting free? Will they be happy to see ‘irrelevant’ ads, even if the sites they love disappear due to lost revenue? The digital industry has grown from a series of organic mutations/trial and error; it has grown very quickly and a lot of very smart people have helped grow it - the same will happen in response to these changes.
A window of opportunity exists for everyone to win from this ‘war’ - a new way for more improved user privacy, a more valuable economy behind the ad ecosystem (which funds a large proportion of the digital economy) and even better advertising economy both for consumers and advertisers. To put it another way - smart people will ensure the game changes for the better.
Introducing - INTUIZI.
What differentiates us is that our ‘Signal Providers’ (publishers, app owners, or other consented signal sources) use our platform to learn about their audiences whilst furthermore anonymously showing our ‘Signal Viewers’ the de-identified/psuedonymized characteristics of those audiences. If a ‘Signal Viewer’ wants to activate against a (encrypted, non-identifiable) user, Intuizi facilitates that by connecting that Viewer with the original Signal Provider so that an ad impression can be purchased directly - in a fully consented and legally compliant manner.
Intuizi processes non-PII, fully-consented de-identified/pseudonymised data – for Point of Information (PoI) we don’t see IDFA, our Signal Providers (who put the data into Intuizi in the first place) warrant that they have consent and that they will encrypt data before passing it to us.
We don’t need a universal identifier, but a publisher-by-publisher one, and as long as that unique identifier is passed through to the DSP, then our system works for all of our customers.
We don’t operate on IDFA, we use an ‘obscured identifier’ – as long as our partners have some kind of ‘key’ (e.g. IP/user agent combo or some other probabilistic or deterministic identifier), then this is enough for us to work with, and to be privacy compliant, as well as highly valuable.
And the kicker? Our prior experience in handling high volumes of data means we can provide fast insight, invaluable insight and - even more amazingly - low-cost insight; as well as incremental revenue to those putting anonymized data into our platform, which already grants them access to enhanced reporting on their consented users.
The future will be disrupted (as is the present) - and we can see that with this disruption comes a great opportunity to organise digital advertising in a more efficient way, helping to ensure that everyone wins - websites, advertisers AND consumers.