Why publishers are getting behind in the data game (or: Why ARE publishers getting behind in the data game?)

Speaking from over a decades experience in online marketing, much of it from the publisher perspective, I can say that publishers (and advertisers) are lagging behind when it comes to data. Data is needed to retain the advertisers budgets, because THEY know that it makes a difference on their bottom line. But many publishers are acting like ostriches (putting their heads in the sand, even if ostriches don’t really do that I know) or they try to tackle the problem on their own (as if they were Google or Facebook).

But the reality is that publishers generally operate in the B2C-sphere, where branding is the most important value they provide and the ad format (Display) is not really a performance driving format. And with that in mind it is not about competing with Search or SoMe KPIs like CTR or CPAs. It is mostly about positioning their brand in the mind of the right 10-20% of the market.

There are a few areas of focus for any publisher that want to add a data/targeting offer to their ad inventory:

First and foremost: 3rd Party Cookies – they are going away and with it most of the previously well performing “buy-side” data.
Secondly: Relevance in the data – advertisers view their customers completely different than publishers. They often think in terms of age and gender, publishers in terms of content. Bridging this gap has been a challenge for as long as I have been working in the industry. It often takes the expression “target sports because men reads sports”. This approach is very different from the market leaders in targeted advertising Google & Facebook.
Thirdly the issue of uniqueness or unification – publishers often think that the solution to make their offer stand out is to add unique data and targeting but advertisers often want to use the same targeting across display inventory and across publishers.
Lastly the issue of ownership – publishers often regard the visitors as “their” customers, and any data that is available on the website as their unique value. This is in some parts true of course but at the same time users move across domains and channels and are seldom loyal to just one brand, be it a publisher or advertiser.

So what does this mean for a publisher that looks to create their own data/targeting offer? And what different approaches can they adopt and what do those options mean for their bottom line? I have a few scenarios that I often see when talking to our customers:

We build our own data platform! Projects like this I have seen a multitude of times the last 10 year’s but very few have actually reached completion and even fewer have or will ever become profitable. This path means buying a lot of development resources, third party services and creating a long term technical debt that is unlikely to ever be profitable on its own. What this path gives you is control and ownership but at the expense of high costs and likely a “stand alone” data/targeting taxonomy.
We leave it to the buy side… This often is the approach of publishers that have been comfortable so far to leave the data to the buyers and buy side technologies. This option is often driven by fear of complications, fear of the GDPR and by not understanding the long term implications. Because the buy side data will become even more scarce or it will be lower in quality as the buy side is likely to only operate on “single observation” data attribution. This means that the data will have low accuracy due to no user history and this risks watering down the value of the publishers ad inventory long term.
We will wait and see. Many publishers are unwilling to take a stand and get started, the insecurities by not knowing the implications of any given technology in relations to the GDPR means that the risk is unknown and the penalties become unknown too. This approach keeps risks low but there is a clear disadvantage of being “last on the ball”. Also this approach means that you will not start learning nor even begin to build an understanding of how data enriches your business.
Get started, see what we learn. This approach will give publishers the possibility to monitor costs, start learning and test the effect of data on their business. And if you take this approach together with someone that is focusing on your own 1st Party data you will ensure that data stays under your control, the value is built in your inventory and you will most likely plug in to some type of “industry standard” that the advertisers are looking for.

Worth mentioning is that these approached are not excluding, they can be combined. If you are a publisher that have your own data platform and solution you can always plug in another provider and compare results, costs and effect on your strategies. If you wait and see you can always start exploring, of course. But I say that one thing is for sure: if you are a publisher that relies on ad revenues, and especially programmatic revenues, you need to have a data layer on your inventory to maintain eCPM-levels and demand for your inventory.

Do you?