With new first-party ID solutions flooding the market, the buy side of the ad industry is looking for ways to enhance campaign targeting and attribution by matching different first-party data sets.
To that end, Goodway Group built its own first-party ID solution dubbed Passport One.
The tool allows advertisers to connect to multiple data sets in one place. It saves them the time and hassle of doing one-to-one connections on their own, said Goodway’s SVP of corporate development and strategic partnerships Amanda Martin.
Passport One is intended to compete with similar solutions from agencies like Publicis, IPG and Accenture. However, these solutions require brands to already have a lot of first-party data at their disposal for matching to other data sets, according to Martin. Goodway Group designed Passport One to be equally suited for advertisers that have large first-party data sets and brands that have not made first-party data gathering a priority.
“You have to bring solutions to brands who don’t already have first-party data, so they can scale their marketing campaigns just as easily as those who do,” Martin said.
Data signals
The Passport One database contains about 300 million consumer profiles, 500 million anonymized email addresses and data on 126 million US households, which is built from a variety of first-party signals, including offline data, consented online data and log-level campaign data.
In contrast to other agency data platforms, Goodway did not acquire the companies responsible for compiling these offline data sets or purchase the data sets themselves, Martin said. Rather, Goodway serves as a connection between advertisers and proprietary data sets provided by independent data brokers.
Goodway clients use Passport One to match their own first-party data and PII against these complementary data sets. Once matched, they can better understand the customers they’re targeting with a given campaign. The identity tool is intended for use in open web programmatic deals as well as for direct deals.
Goodway will work with its clients to determine the gaps in their existing first-party data and which first-party data solutions match their needs. The agency will examine how a client’s data collection mechanisms affect its targeting capabilities and whether other signals like contextual data may be more effective, Martin said.
For example, Goodway is working with a national retailer to enrich the first-party data that retail brand has accrued from its consumer relations management (CRM) platform by appending more than 100 lifestyle and demographic characteristics derived from complementary data sets, Martin said.
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The Passport One solution is emblematic of Goodway’s strategy for how the post-cookie advertising ecosystem will shake out. Third-party cookies will not be replaced by a single first-party targeting solution but a variety of first-party signals. These signals must be tailored to the needs of individual brands and campaigns, Martin said.
Targetable audiences
Being able to overlay audience insights pulled from specific geographical locations with purchase behavior to create custom targetable audiences is a particularly powerful way to overlay first-party data, Martin said.
“The exciting part here is the granularity of geo-targeting layered with so many data points,” she said.
Any targetable audiences created through the use of Passport One will be anonymized, without any one-to-one targeting of individual users, Martin said.
With cookie deprecation in Chrome pushed back to the end of 2023, Goodway Group sees the delay as an opportunity to test its Passport One offering against cookie-based targeting solutions still in use in the market.
“Cookies were an easy button but not necessarily the best solution. And while [post-cookie solutions] may make [targeting] more complex, it doesn’t mean that the same results can’t be achieved,” Martin said.
