Tatari is keeping clean rooms in the family.
On Monday, the TV buying and measurement platform announced the launch of a new sister company called Vault, whose first product is a data clean room.
Although Tatari already provides cross-channel measurement for advertisers and programmers, it leans heavily on IP addresses, which can sometimes be considered personally identifiable information.
Instead of IP addresses, Vault will create “tokens” by matching first-party data from publishers and advertisers with Experian identifiers. Experian has a database of 125 million US households covering 270 million viewers. It uses cookies, mobile ad IDs and hashed emails to link individual devices to household IDs, which are created using names, addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses.
In terms of Tatari’s approaches to measurement, CEO Philip Inghelbrecht said, “nothing is changing except that we’re replacing IP addresses with [new identity] tokens through the Vault clean room.”
Tatari is launching Vault as a separate company, rather than as a product under its own umbrella, to avoid perceived conflicts of interest, so non-Tatari customers can feel comfortable using the clean room.
Vault, Tatari and TheViewPoint (the SSP Tatari acquired in 2022) are now three subsidiaries under a new parent company called Infra.
Behind closed doors
Tatari sees Vault as a way to future-proof how it already delivers cross-publisher measurement reporting to programmers and agencies, Inghelbrecht said, as well as to provide interoperability, which not all clean rooms do.
Clean rooms are good for privacy, but they aren’t always great at addressing the gaps in TV measurement.
Since the IDs in Experian’s database include multiple data points, it’s able to link an ad exposure to a household or an individual even without an IP address or cookies, said Christopher Feo, SVP of sales at Experian.
In addition to cross-channel measurement reporting, Vault also advises clients on budget allocation, depending on campaign results. Programmers can compare ad inventory yield to other publishers, while brands can compare campaign performance across different networks.
To respect competitive information, Tatari delivers comparative campaign results at an aggregate level.
For example, rather than telling a publisher what its yield is for a specific advertiser compared to other publishers, Vault will say that the advertiser generates yield that is a certain percentage above the average, said Inghelbrecht. Similarly, advertisers can see how their campaigns perform on average compared to other advertisers in the same vertical.
Fill in the blanks
Programmers can benefit from comparing their advertising yield with their competitors to decide how to price inventory and get a sense of how they’re doing against their competition.
To be fair, NBCUniversal, Disney and Roku all offer their own clean room, but those products help buyers target and measure audiences across one publisher’s streaming and linear inventory; they don’t help advertisers compare campaigns across other programmers.
Publishers are known for keeping their first-party data under lock and key as a competitive advantage. It makes sense, but it’s also stalling the interoperability the industry demands.
Since Tatari is a TV measurement company at its core and with no inventory to sell, it could be in a good position to convince programmers to share audience and campaign data through Vault. NBCU might not be in a rush to share its data with Disney, for example, but sharing it with a noncompetitive third party could be a different story.
Tatari’s neutral positioning in the TV space could be attractive to buyers and sellers, said Mark Rotblat, chief revenue officer at Fox-owned streaming service Tubi. He added that Tubi will evaluate and consider using Vault because it already works with Tatari.
Tatari noticed a similar pattern of adoption among its publisher clients after it acquired TheViewPoint last year.
The company hopes Vault will become one of several data clean rooms that both publishers and agencies will turn to for cross-platform measurement, Inghelbrecht said, adding that Tatari currently works with almost every major TV programmer other than YouTube.
