SSP, meet PET.
Supply-side platform TrustX has been spun out of publisher trade group Digital Content Next (DCN) and is now housed within a newly formed company called Symitri, which is developing privacy-enhancing technologies for programmatic advertising.
As part of the deal, which was announced on Monday, Symitri is getting $5 million in funding from AperiamVentures (Eric Franchi and Joe Zawadzki’s VC firm), KB Partners and Trajectory Ventures, along with angel investment from Jonah Goodhart, Ari Paparo and Will Luttrell.
TrustX first launched in 2017 as a private marketplace helmed by David Kohl, where members of DCN could pool their inventory in an exchange with a human-viewable guarantee.
Under DCN, TrustX operated as a public benefit corporation, meaning a for-profit entity that also aims to have a positive social impact.
As a subsidiary of Symitri, TrustX will maintain its B Corp status, said Kohl, CEO and co-founder of the new company. And the TrustX marketplace will continue to operate as usual without any changes.
A quicker clean room
The idea for Symitri was born around three years ago as it became increasingly clear publishers were in a bind.
The “train had left the station” in terms of state privacy regulations, Kohl said, and the big platforms were also making major privacy changes. But publishers were concerned new, supposedly privacy-preserving identity solutions would simply perpetuate data leakage and devalue inventory.
“Publishers have been really burned by that over the past decade and a half in programmatic,” Kohl said. “We let our data out into the ecosystem, others make all of the money, and we get commoditized.”
One obvious solution is for publishers and their demand partners to use a clean room setup to collaborate without sharing the underlying data sets.
But, although they’re valuable for data protection, clean rooms are also costly and complex to implement, Kohl said. And, most importantly, the analysis isn’t real-time enough for programmatic transactions.
So TrustX partnered with cloud computing provider Akamai to develop a pilot for a real-time clean room using Akamai’s high-speed content delivery network, which can share and return data within milliseconds.
“This way, we could use a matchable identity layer between a buyer and seller to make an instant connection,” Kohl said, “without pushing any identity data into the bidstream.”
Cohorts for the bidstream
Keeping the data safe is what Symitri calls “an integrated privacy firewall,” which is a fancy way of saying that the real-time clean room operates behind a protective barrier of sorts.
Symitri makes extemporaneous matches behind this firewall between a buyer’s audience and the open web publishers that use the system. Once there’s a match made, users are assigned to cohorts and the individual data gets erased.
“We hide the individual in a large, anonymous group, and we expose that group in the bidstream without any individual personal information or other identifying data,” Kohl said.
For example, say an airline wants to reach its loyalty members with a campaign on the open web. The airline has a list of email addresses but doesn’t want to expose them, of course.
Symitri has a Prebid adapter that monitors ad requests and inspects IDs within ad calls on the sell side. If a user who visits a page is also a loyalty member and Symitri can successfully make a match, it drops an encrypted ID to identify the device that way, adds it to a cohort and passes that information back to the SSP.
“We’re basically saying to the publisher, ‘I’m not going to tell you anything about this user, but you should know that this airline wants to buy this user,’” Kohl said. “It’s a deterministic match, where we remove the PII so the ad tech supply chain can activate through a deal ID.”
‘Symitrize’ this campaign
For now, this remains a proof of concept, but there’s evidence it works, according to Kohl. It’s been tested among TrustX publishers, including The Washington Post, Paramount and Fox.
The plan is to get a beta up and running with buyers and sellers later this summer. They also hope to integrate with a handful of identity and data technology providers, although Kohl couldn’t share names yet.
Symitri will also partner with other SSPs and DSPs. The purpose of spinning TrustX out of Digital Content Next was to have an integrated data partner with existing connections in the premium publisher ecosystem.
But TrustX isn’t designed to be the exclusive beneficiary of Symitri’s technology, Kohl said.
The intention is to eventually serve as a distributed security layer that sits underneath the ad tech supply chain without disrupting the way programmatic already works. There isn’t any special code for a DSP or SSP to implement Symitri because it relies on deal IDs.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever use this word,” Kohl said, “but imagine a checkbox that asks people: ‘Do you want to “Symitrize” this campaign?’”
(But maybe let’s workshop that one.)
In terms of pricing, there won’t be any upfront installation costs, and Symitri will only charge a small SaaS fee whenever it helps an ad transaction clear through the bidstream – likely no more than a few pennies per CPM.
All seven of Trust’s employees have joined Symitri, and the plan is to double the headcount by the end of the year.
