“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Andrew Rosenman, global product marketing lead for advanced TV and video at Equativ.
Seller Defined Audiences (SDAs) are poised to become a replacement standard for cookies. But time will tell whether they can provide the degree of granularity that advertisers need.
At first glance, the initiative to organize audiences in a more standardized, nuanced manner brings back a level of control that has been slipping away from publishers. In theory, there is a lot a publisher may know about how audiences interact with their content that doesn’t fit neatly into the way cookies operate or the broader categorization schemas that are used today.
Publishers often find themselves having to commit to primary domain designations like “news,” “sports” or “entertainment,” which may provide a high-level content label but fail to express the uniqueness of the actual people that derive recurring value from their content. This is where SDAs can make all the difference.
SDAs can strengthen ad strategies
Consider a site dedicated to a specific hobby or pastime – like sailing – with dedicated and committed viewers that participate by commenting in a well-moderated forum. This publisher is less focused on scale or audience size and instead measures success by the degree to which it services its audience.
Meanwhile, let’s say an advertiser recognizes that its core consumer base over-indexes for interest in sailing, a hobby that requires disposable income and leisure time. For an advertiser of luxury goods or travel, this is a lucrative audience to reach. But each advertiser will have slightly different needs that a publisher can meet using sculpted SDAs.
For example, a luxury watch manufacturer may know their prime target is a professional male, age 50 and above, who lives within 15 miles of one of their retail locations. The publisher can define an audience segment that meets this criteria and allow that brand to reach this segment using higher-impact media formats like rich media and video on their site.
The brand is spending the same amount but using SDAs to improve its message fidelity on the site. Ideally, the geotargeting of these users will drive foot traffic to the retail locations and for audiences outside of the primary retail radius to ecommerce options.
On the flip side, an airline may come with the insight that people with an affinity for sailing correlate to more frequent purchases of business and first-class airfare. The airline can then deliver promotional messages about the comfort, quality and service differentiators of its aircraft to a seller-defined audience segment that also has interests around travel-related goods and services.
It is the publisher’s insight in the form of SDAs that allows the airline to reach its highest-value customers, delivering this value directly to the brand as a media partner.
A value-add for both sides
With SDAs, publishers are providing substantial value to advertisers by alleviating the burden of formulating targeting strategies. This actually benefits both parties as well as consumers, since relevant ads enhance the overall user experience. In a perfect world, SDA-based advertiser campaigns will scale across multiple publishers who are using a common SDA taxonomy, allowing for broad reach while maintaining profound levels of efficiency.
Whether SDAs can fully replace the cookie-based system is unclear. What is clear, however, is that any substitute must work to give publishers the capacity to bring their best product to the marketplace and for advertisers to recognize the benefits of nuanced audience segmentation provided by their publishing partners.
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