SpotX expands privacy-compliant CTV audience data tools

Friday, April 16th, 2021
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SpotX Expands Privacy-Compliant Audience Data Technology for CTV

  • Suite of Data Tools Empowers Media Owners and Advertisers to Leverage First-Party, Third-Party, or Subscriber Data for Audience Targeting

NEW YORK — SpotX, the leading global video advertising platform, today announced it has developed a comprehensive suite of custom audience data tools that enables media owners and advertisers to target audiences using first-party, third-party, or subscriber data in a privacy-compliant way. SpotX first began investing in and developing advanced technologies that support data activation and protection for connected TV (CTV) four years ago and has been actively expanding its capabilities which has coincided with an industry shift toward more supply-side data activation.

“We recognized early on that the CTV industry would need a supply-side data activation solution which is very different from how other areas of digital media operate,” said Mike Laband, Senior Vice President, Platform at SpotX. “It’s extremely gratifying to see the market grow and embrace the audience-based targeting suite that we’ve been building for years. Because we’ve created technology that takes all privacy regulations into consideration, we expect to see even more adoption moving forward, especially as additional privacy restrictions are enforced.”

Approximately 92% of all CTV transactions on SpotX’s platform occur within private marketplaces (PMPs). This growing number translates into more advertisers considering a data strategy on the supply-side to ensure a return on advertising spend (ROAS). However, CTV media owners have significantly more premium inventory than ever before and are deeply concerned with protecting their associated data. Having spent years building deep relationships with key stakeholders across the streaming TV ecosystem, SpotX is now uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between media owners and advertisers by managing sensitive, data-driven transactions. In 2020, SpotX saw a 313% increase YoY in impressions trading with data and 118 media owners activated audience data-based campaigns utilizing both first- and third-party data.

For media owners wary of data leakage, SpotX’s technology can preemptively refine video ad inventory against audience data and content signals on the supply side in a privacy-compliant manner. It also restricts any personal information signals that are passed to the buy side in the bid request (through IP addresses, device IDs, and additional signals), as well as obfuscates the data in the beacons.

Media owners can also strengthen campaign targeting strategies while maintaining consumer privacy by combining first-party data sets and/or matching them with multiple other data sets (from advertisers or third-party data sources). This method of data sharing moves away from pixels and beacons to ensure there is no unintended data leakage. As a result, media owners gain more control of their campaigns and heightened precision while protecting their first-party audience data.

As third-party cookies dissipate, many advertisers have turned to CTV, which represents over 70% of SpotX’s business, and relies on users to log in and give consent. Advertisers that leverage SpotX’s audience data technology can access customized log-level data and reporting to build valuable insights, signals, and audience data sets, thereby increasing advertisers’ ROAS while supporting supply path optimization. The technology also provides advertisers with better inventory visibility for planning and forecasting, as well as enhanced programmatic guaranteed executions.

Links: SpotX