Addressing Addressability – A Defining Moment for Digital Media

Making smart media buying decisions depends on having a deep understanding of your audience. Looking at consumer journeys and delving into segmentation strategies is a critical part of the planning process. Once a clear definition is in play, finding scale becomes the central focus.

When deciding where to invest media budgets it is critical to have access to consistent measurement against a standardized audience definition. Traditionally, the industry has relied heavily on third party data to drive scale. As the industry innovates for post third party cookie technology, the work has accelerated around standardization of audience and contextual content definitions. Concurrently, publishers and advertisers are investing heavily in the cultivation of first party data stores to get ahead of the cookie-less media environment.

With global privacy regulation driving the demand for “privacy by design” advertising, addressable audiences of the future will rely heavily on transparency, control and consent. Successful advertisers will have access to large scale of audiences at the lowest cost. IAB has been following the DTC market for several years and has been studying the ways in which these brands dominate in the legitimate collection of first party data which translates directly to “addressable audience” stores.

This week at IAB Tech Lab Reboot, the addressable audience panel discussed what a successful addressability metric looks like. We heard that publishers through subscriptions and other sign-in methods will have roughly 20-30% of addressability to start. Brick and Mortar brands that are currently transitioning towards DTC will see considerable growth over the next year (closer to 60%) and the pure play DTC brands will have close to 90% addressability based on their models.

As the industry works towards open source solutions that will enable trade online, the Rearc working groups are evaluating some compelling proposals that will enable privacy by design audiences in a much safer and more transparent media environment. To move forward, the industry must work hard to help develop standardized definitions, taxonomy, measurement and currency parameters.

As proposals continue to come forward, the lens by which they will be evaluated will include some of the following considerations:

  • Privacy by default that supports an internationally inter-operable framework – with transparency and controls.
  • Platform and browser-agnostic access to content across the web based on choices of the citizen.
  • A clear value exchange between content access and data shared.

It’s all hands-on deck at the moment and IAB Canada is both encouraged and energized by the global community coming together to crack on the fundamental mechanics of the future of online advertising.