By Ben Kneen, Senior Director, Product Management, Xandr
The identity world is fragmented. The death of the third-party cookie is well publicized, but there are other dynamics in play complicating the identity landscape. The growth in video spend across multiple formats, devices and providers is also a huge challenge.
Buyers and sellers must adjust to the harsh operational realities and challenges while working with multiple solutions simultaneously.
Fortunately, there’s hope for both buyers and sellers with the deal ID emerging as an unexpected hero, capable of unifying ad tech across new identities and formats.
Buyers should invest more in seller deal sourcing and curated marketplace technology to manage supply paths
Buyers have two tactical strategies they can pursue:
- They can actively source deals from individual sellers that either have relevant context or first-party identity assets for a clear, accessible audience. Buyers are already experienced with this approach. More importantly, these types of seller deals can offer buyers a competitive advantage on price, priority and inventory access otherwise unavailable on the open exchange. As a result, buyers can differentiate their supply strategy for customers.
- They can use curation technology to manage new deals effectively, making it simpler for trading teams to buy against a bespoke marketplace with aggregated solutions. Curation technology can combine many seller deal IDs into a single deal for traders for easier targeting, scalability and updating across many campaigns and DSPs.
Curation technology will also simplify how companies work across multiple identity technologies, whether using device IDs, cookie IDs, first-party seller data, industry identifiers, semantic data or something else entirely. Companies can centralize integration needs on a single platform and activate anywhere through the familiar and mature deal workflows that are already supported by its teams and technology partners.
Sellers should invest in sophisticated deal technology and aggressively merchandise
It’s time for sellers to double down on their deals business. They should view their assets and merchandising strategy through a new lens, as they’re no longer competing with cookie-based retargeting strategies that endlessly scale on cheap inventory.
Buyers have been consolidating their eligible sellers lists for years. Identity challenges and video opportunities simply accelerate an existing trend.
A future-proof platform should include first-party data, built-in demand and support for identity technologies and video-centric targeting capabilities.
Competitive advantage will come from optionality and operability, not picking winners
A lot of smart people are trying to build innovative solutions around the identity challenges in the market right now. Buyers and sellers should consider how they execute campaigns with those technologies in the real world.
While potential solutions could take the form of new platform integrations and vendor relationships, deals can play a critical role in how transactions actually work. The marketplace has invested in deal technology for years. Deals are ubiquitous in buyer platforms, and trading teams on both sides of the marketplace are experienced on the technology.
Deals play an important role with the growth in video and more selective supply path management solutions. It’s only natural to include them in the activation layer for identity as well.
By leaning into this commercial path, buyers and sellers can use deals to execute new technologies faster – giving them a competitive advantage over those who wait for more native support.
