New avenues for interoperability across platforms have made it possible for audiences to be shared across screens, but the reality is not as simple as it may sound, Just because the same audience is shared everywhere an ad is run, doesn’t mean the same audience is actually being used for targeting, as audiences are translated and mapped back to households differently by each platform, publisher or data partner. OpenAP CEO David Levy took the stage at Audience Summit Cannes Lions to break down the inconsistencies with household mapping and explain how OpenAP is bringing consistency and transparency to the equation to unify audience targeting across platforms.
A lack of audience standardization holds back not only a consistent view of who saw an ad, but it inhibits the ability to layer on more sophisticated and insightful data applications too. You can’t do big data applications unless audience householding is standardized.
Why is there a disconnect between audience and targeting information when translated by different publishers? It’s because the audience data and identifiers being used for matching is probabilistic; meaning, we’re guessing which identifiers belong to different households. Unless we as an industry can move from probabilistic to deterministic data, advertising dollars will continue to be wasted on the wrong audiences.
Right now, 80% of data running through TV is probabilistic. OpenAP’s endeavor is to flip that to 80% deterministic data, with only 20% probabilistic. “We need to get to a place where, even if a viewer is not logged in, we have a deterministic view, as much as possible, of who this person is,” explained Levy.” Our plan is to get there. Our plan is not only to create this system, but to have as much quality data as possible in the system.”
How will we get there? In Open Identity, OpenAP has already licensed ISP data for about 50% of the market, meaning we’ll have an accurate, deterministic view of IP-to-household mapping for half of all viewers.
OpenAP has also built out capabilities for Identity Protocols in Open Identity. Identity Protocols are a set of instructions for how to apply and match audience data that go beyond providing transparency to give agencies control, allowing for much bigger applications of data down the line. Those big data applications could get us closer to providing a more consistent, transparent picture of consumer behavior over the entire course of the consumer journey–sometimes months, or even years–not just last-click attribution.