Livingly Media Is Seeing Revenue Windfalls Thanks to its Third-Party Cookie Phase-Out

Despite the public declarations kicking the third-party cookie habit can be tough. To help persuade marketers, lifestyle publisher Livingly Media allows media buyers to test third-party data with its own first-party segments. After seeing the results for themselves, buyers are upping their spend. The publisher has a number of lifestyle female-focused sites including Mabel + Moxie, Lonny and Zimbio, and claims to reach 20 million user each month. And it's only been able to collect and monetize first-party data on this audience since working with a data management platform Permutive last summer. Since August, around a dozen marketers have tested the publisher's first-party data against third-party. The goal: allow for more direct relationships with advertisers, reduce reliance on open exchange revenue and improve campaign performance. So far it’s seeing results. A consumer packaging goods client, it wouldn't share the name, increased spend fivefold in the second half of 2020. Campaign viewability improved 10% above the brand's benchmark, according to the publisher. “We’re anticipating how marketers will transact on media not in the next year but in the next three years,” said CEO Erica Carter. Third-party cookie-enabled data for targeting, at best, is clunky. Publishers like The New York Times and The Telegraph have publicly sworn it off. Despite that, buyers are slow to move to alternatives that don’t have the same functions marketers are accustomed to, like measurement and attribution. But with the death of the third-party cookie and the rise of regulation, the urgency has ratcheted up. Google Just Dropped Another Privacy Bomb on Independent Ad Tech Deal sell-through rate has doubled Livingly Media started working with Permutive last June to build up its first-party data segments, giving it more visibility on platforms and browsers where third-party cookies for targeting are already nixed. With high numbers of audiences accessing via iPhones, which prevent cross-site targeting, Carter guessed at least 50% of its audience was dark. For marketers looking to test, Livingly creates deals that clients want using their preferred data segment into the specific inventory packages the publisher has, like new parents, women's wellness or retail shoppers. It then creates a replica of the deal, layers in its first-party audiences, and has the client strip out its own first-party data. Once the campaign goes live, the demand-side platform optimizes towards whichever deal is performing better towards whatever performance indicators the brand is focused on—these tend to be viewability, click-through rate or cost-per-acquisition—and scales accordingly. It’s a big prospecting tool for us. We’re trying to be problem solving sellers CEO Erica Carter Comparing the two had a near-immediate impact on revenue: With first-party data as part of its commercial offering, Livingly doubled its deal sell-through rate year-over-year, which it calculates as a percentage of its total revenue transacted via deals with an advertiser versus open auction revenue. Deal revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 was more than triple the same period the year prior, the publisher said, without sharing specifics. Standardize segments Different publishers have different definitions and qualifying criteria for their first-party data, said Ana Milicevic, principal & co-founder of digital consultancy Sparrow Advisers. "'Furniture high spender' could have very different qualifying criteria between publishers," she said. Anticipating this, Livingly Media built north of 300 different audience segments based on the IAB’s Tech Lab's Content Taxonomy, the industry standard. Once it creates audience segments it can proactively approach clients to share more about this audience behavior. By collecting more than 40 data points per page view, like keywords, where the viewer came from, scroll, depth, time spent, slots viewed, it uncovers niche audiences like women in the market for gut-health wellness. “It’s a big prospecting tool for us. We’re trying to be problem solving sellers,” said Carter. Third-party data generalization Livingly has saved clients money on third-party data costs and improved scale and performance of campaigns. But it’s tough to figure out how many more clients Livingly is winning just by having a data management platform. “The generalization that happens for third-party data leads it to be questionable in terms of quality,” said Dan Elddine, vp, head of data strategy, North America at Essence. “Publishers that can properly define why their known users are special becomes quite valuable.” Elddine points to a familiar example of the limitations of third-party cookie-enabled data: requesting a copy of your personal data from mar tech companies leads to people discovering they are both male and female, fit into five different age categories, have three kids and also no kids. Right now, everyone is into green living. An ongoing consideration will be growing these deals. The 45-person publisher will need to bring on more sales staff to manage and help client services. Carter notes that Google's announcement regarding identifiers is an “urgent reminder that the way transacting on media today is going away." Adweek Audience Poll Reveals Polarized Opinions on Google and the Future of Ad Tech

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Livingly Media Is Seeing Revenue Windfalls Thanks to its Third-Party Cookie Phase-Out

It has doubled year-over-year sell-through rate

Lucinda Southern

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