What happens when an ad tech developer partners with a cybersecurity expert to start a new company?
You end up with a consumer product that is both a privacy software service and a programmatic advertising ID.
Meet Rewarded Interest, a company launched last year by Scott Spencer and Thede Loder. Spencer was a long-time Google ad tech product leader who joined with the DoubleClick acquisition, and Loder was most recently an engineering leader at Microsoft via the acquisition of RiskIQ.
Spencer and Loder are attempting an idea that has been tested many times, but never brought to life successfully – although there’s a new twist this time.
Rewarded Interest has a Chrome browser extension that promises users a cut of the revenue they generate from online tracking data. But, unlike other browser extensions or ad blockers, the product is meant to integrate with the ad tech ecosystem rather than replacing or blocking ads on the page.
So, how does it work?
As of now, the browser extension has just a few hundred downloads. Users fill in their privacy preferences once, and the extension takes care of setting those preferences for each consent pop-up banner a person normally would see.
The Rewarded Interest ID is a programmatic tool, akin to an ID5 or The Trade Desk’s Unified 2.0. A user’s info is placed in the OpenRTB identity field as an encrypted set of numbers, which advertisers can unlock, so to speak, but only if they partner with Rewarded Interest and accept the 10% media fee for using the ID. Half of the fee goes to the user and half goes to Rewarded Interest.
“We’ve designed this so that everybody wins,” Loder said.
For advertisers, there’s the ID itself, which can be incorporated into their own CRM and used for tracking across devices like most other third-party programmatic IDs.
Publishers would benefit from the reduced latency, since the tech manages the consent pop-up process before it starts, thereby lowering the bounce rate since some people leave when confronted with a pop-up.
Eventually, Loder said, “we estimate that consumers could get maybe $40 per year in terms of value back from media spend in the form of these rewards on the extension.”
Where theory meets reality
Rewarded Interest may work hypothetically as a win across the whole online advertising value chain. But making it happen in practice is a tough proposition.
For one, there’s the challenge of baseline adoption. The demand side of the industry – like agencies and DSPs – will adopt the product if there’s scale. They’re looking for addressability wherever they can find it, and a 10% fee isn’t so eye-popping compared to what advertisers pay for retail media data or other deterministic IDs.
“Our goal is to bring a cross-device identifier,” Spencer said. “There’s no need for a clean room, no need for match coding.”
But acquiring users is tough. Third-party browser extensions don’t have the performance marketing funnel of mobile game downloads, say, nor is there much buzz behind browser extensions on social platforms (not even LinkedIn).
To make people aware of the product, Rewarded Interest may turn to publishers and streaming TV operators.
Users, for example, can input their privacy preferences within one browser, but that creates a single profile that could be applied across other devices, Spencer said. Some CTV companies have expressed interest in partnering, he said, because they want a more frictionless consent process than the current model, where people often have to spell out their emails or account names and passwords using buttons on a remote control.
On the other hand, that involves getting CTV apps to integrate or embed the code in their own SDKs.
Although the first iteration of its product is a browser extension, Rewarded Interest will also operate its own app eventually, Spencer said.
There is a great deal of education required, Spencer said, to gain adoption across more devices, like via smart TVs and streaming apps, as well as just for the browser-based ID.
But he’s confident there’s the will in the market.
As the former leader of Google’s ads privacy and safety team, he said, “I really got to understand that consumers, when engaged, are willing to do a lot of things and appreciate that opportunity to understand what’s going on online.”
