Brain Nordic have partnered with PubMatic SSP to supply the BRAIN.MEDIA-service to PubMatic customers through their SSP platform. This partnership extends worldwide and is a way to secure programmatic audience data without the use of 3rd party cookies.
Håkan Hamrin, Head of Programmatic at Stampen Media, a mutual client of PubMatic and Brain Nordic says: It is a big challenge to manage 3rd party cookies that are blocked to an increasing extent. At Stampen Media we want to be forward-thinking in managing this challenge and we are glad that Brain Nordic have the same approach and comes with new smart solutions. Through their service we are now able to offer “id-free” deals, which means we don’t have to pass any IDs at all and is also built on our 1st Party Data. This makes us feel more secure in terms of the future developments both technically and legally from a GDPR perspective.
BRAIN.MEDIA is a Brain Nordic service that originally was created by Stampen Media, Mittmedia, Promedia, Norran, VLT Media and Sörmlands Media, local media houses in Sweden, to secure data in their programmatic revenue stream. The need arose when the local publishers saw an increasing share of the local ad spend go to global data players such as Google and Facebook. The decrease in ad revenues for local publishers directly put local journalism at risk, which is one of the fundaments for democracy.
Brain Nordic have continued to develop the BRAIN.MEDIA service in the spirit of our previous owners, working to connect advertisers directly with publishers through secure data. And the issue of data is far from just local today. Brain Nordic have observed and prepared for the disappearance of 3rd party cookies with groundbreaking technologies that are both 3rd party cookie independent but also more secure in terms of user data exposure.
PubMatic and Brain Nordic have had a previous case where we verified the improved audience addressability through the use of 1st party data. See case study here.
For PubMatic customers this means that they can add demographic, socio-economic, contextual and interest data to their 1st Party ad inventory through the existing PubMatic integration. The Brain Nordic Standard Taxonomy supports IAB v2.0 taxonomy as well as the Brain Nordic population data taxonomy. This means advertisers can use a unified taxonomy across all websites that have the BRAIN.MEDIA service.

Martin Bergqvist, CEO Brain Nordic:
We were approached by PubMatic in Sweden who through our common clients had become familiar with our services. PubMatic had identified us as a suitable partner to add 1st party data in a smooth and efficient way. Ensuring an independence of 3rd party cookies for ad targeting.
Brain Nordic have always had a focus on publisher 1st party data as well as integrity online, from the start of the Brain-project. And we have always pushed the limits of what data is stored and how it is processed in regards to privacy and integrity. And we are continuing to do so.
We performed successful test together with PubMatic deploying our service through the PubMatic SSP with a common client. The test was successful so now we have proceed with signing a partnership agreement so that we can now offer our services to all PubMatic customers worldwide. This is of course very exciting for us.
I have always known that what we do is highly relevant, but sometimes the market need to catch up with the innovation in order to create timing, and now we are there.