Publishers looking to grow their addressable audience just got a new way to entice users to share an email address.
The rewarded single sign-on (SSO) provider Bonbon announced on Thursday that it’s integrating with The Trade Desk’s (TTD) OpenPass SSO.
Bonbon gives users rewards – such as discounts or chances to win merchandise – for setting up email registrations with publishers and engaging with their content. With the new integration, OpenPass will give publishers the option to include that same rewards functionality.
Publishers that use either Bonbon or OpenPass can convert email addresses they collect into targetable, but anonymized, hashed IDs using The Trade Desk’s go-to alternative ad ID, UID2.
The integration aims to help publishers gather more first-party data for ad targeting to offset the loss of third-party cookies and other identity signals like IP addresses.
Buy-side and sell-side benefits
In the face of signal loss, publishers basically have three options, said Bonbon CEO and Co-Founder Elliott Easterling. Those options include contextual targeting, fingerprinting or trying to reenable addressability through ID products.
“We’re focusing on enabling addressability by working with alternative ID providers to replace the targeting that’s been lost with cookies,” he said.
That jives well with The Trade Desk’s goal to authenticate the open internet, said its GM of global identity, platform strategy and partnerships Gabe Richman. But doing so “requires earning authentication from the consumer.”
The Trade Desk felt Bonbon’s rewards-based approach was an innovative way to spur adoption of SSO solutions among end users, Richman said.
Every gain in media adoption for OpenPass and UID2 gives buyers a larger pool of addressable traffic to target though The Trade Desk’s platform. So, TTD wants to give publishers tools to collect more addressable data.
“It’s much easier to go to publishers with a suite of tools they can use to capture more emails by presenting a value exchange for the consumer, and then turn that email into an advertising ID that they can monetize,” he said.
Once users sign up with their emails, they receive regular messages from Bonbon highlighting publisher content tailored to their interests, and can receive additional rewards for clicking links. That keeps traffic flowing to publishers and improves its pool of first-party behavioral data.
Scaling first-party data
The new incentives should be a boost to OpenPass, which is still in the early days of growing its publisher network, Richman said.
The Trade Desk soft-launched OpenPass in the second half of last year, but has declined to disclose how many publishers have signed up thus far.
Meanwhile, Bonbon currently has 32 publishers in its network, which is geared toward desktop websites. It also recently partnered with publisher monetization platform Adapex, which has a network of some 300 publishers that might be interested in an SSO, Easterling said. Bonbon will also pursue integrations with mobile app and CTV publishers by the end of the year.
But there’s only so much scale a publisher network can offer on its own. Currently, Bonbon’s network attracts about 15 million monthly page views, Easterling said. The goal is to reach 50 million by the end of the quarter.
The real opportunity for improving audience scale and publisher CPMs comes from the ID integration, though, since it creates more matched IDs across an advertiser’s customer set and the publisher’s audience, and across other publishers that use the same alternative ID.
“UID2 seems to be neck and neck with [LiveRamp’s] RampID in what’s getting the highest CPM lift today,” said Bonbon Co-Founder and CRO Will McGivern-Smith. For advertisers and media with UID2 deployed on Safari and Firefox (i.e., cookieless browsers), there is a two times lift in average CPM compared to anonymous inventory.
Nonexclusive
To be clear, the partnership between Bonbon and The Trade Desk isn’t exclusive. In addition to UID2, Bonbon has network-level alternative ID integrations with LiveRamp and ID5. These Bonbon-enabled alternative IDs drive demand through The Trade Desk’s DSP and other DSPs.
The Bonbon/OpenPass partnership also doesn’t affect The Trade Desk’s OpenPath direct buyer-to-publisher connection (despite the similar names). The Trade Desk operates its SSO as a standalone offering, so just because a publisher signs up for OpenPass doesn’t mean they’re added to OpenPath, Richman said.
The lack of exclusivity – and the fact that publishers ultimately own whatever first-party data they gather from their SSO integrations – are how The Trade Desk tries to distinguish itself from walled garden models, Richman sad.
At the end of the day, this collaboration is all about bringing more addressability to the open internet. Which makes sense, since both companies have a vested interest in publishers adopting alternatives to Big Tech’s SSOs – the most popular single sign-on options are to log in with Apple, Facebook or with Google.
“If we can enable alternative IDs in a way that empowers consumers, then we’re reenabling addressability with consumer consent and a valid value exchange,” Easterling said. “Let Apple, Google and Facebook do their thing, but there should be alternatives.”
