U.K. Publisher Reach Plc. Partners With LiveRamp to Adopt Its ATS Technology

The U.K. publisher Reach plc., which houses titles like the Manchester Evening News and The Mirror, announced that it has partnered with the data enablement platform LiveRamp to adopt its Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), a move that it ultimately hopes will lead to higher digital advertising revenues. The partnership will allow marketers using the LiveRamp platform to transact against the logged-in readership of Reach plc., a cohort of 11 million monthly readers, according to the publisher. Across all of its titles, Reach plc. has a monthly readership of 42 million, making it the biggest news publisher in the U.K. by audience size, according to data from the research firm Ipsos. The announcement comes amidst a period of significant change in the digital marketing industry, as the looming deprecation of third-party cookies has prompted publishers and marketers alike to retool their advertising strategies to operate without the tracking technology. No one solution will replace third-party cookies on its own, said Ari Paparo, the co-founder of ad-tech consultancy Marketecture, but ATS aims to help publishers and marketers monetize their known users, a highly valuable audience thanks to the volume of data that can be associated with it. “The technology enables us and the marketer to work together closely, rather than building a graph that is used elsewhere,” said Terry Hornsby, the digital and innovation director for Reach plc. “LiveRamp is a tool for publishers, and that's why we chose them as a partner.” Seller-Defined Audiences Face Trust Issues in Taming the Open Web How Authenticated Traffic Solutions works The LiveRamp technology ATS specifically helps monetize logged-in, or known, audiences, who in the case of Reach plc. provide the publisher either an email address or their postal code, according to Hornsby. This information, along with the browsing history Reach plc. can associate with user profiles, allows marketers to serve them more targeted ads, which translates into higher CPMs. Like other publishers, Reach plc. collects these logins by placing content behind registration walls, promoting its newsletters, offering location-based content customization location and other value exchanges. LiveRamp takes this personal information and hashes it, which turns it into a string of characters, creating a pseudonymous identifier it calls RampID. LiveRamp then compares the RampID of audiences from Reach plc. with RampIDs provided by marketers, who bring their own first-, second- or third-party data to the platform. After the two parties overlay their data, creating a more expansive picture of the browsing history of a particular RampID, the two can transact against those audiences in direct deals, private marketplaces, programmatic guaranteed deals or on the open exchange, said Travis Clinger, the senior vice president of addressability and activations at LiveRamp. The technology also allows marketers to track any impression bought on RampID and connect it back to their data, providing a similar level of end-to-end tracking offered by third-party cookies. “These kinds of solutions have been available for years in the walled gardens––it is part of why they have succeeded,” Clinger said. “But now we're able to level the playing field and give open-web publishers like Reach the same capabilities.” RampID faces scale and privacy challenges Like all alternative identifiers, ATS and RampID become more valuable the more buy-in they receive from ad buyers and publishers. LiveRamp works with publishers who prefer to act as walled gardens, keeping their audience data siloed, as well as those that prefer to transact on the open web, an agnostic approach that makes it more accessible. It has signed partnerships with Hearst and CBS, among other publishers, and it works with more than 70 demand-side platforms and more than 450 advertisers. The company also benefits from its history of using third-party cookies to match publisher and advertiser data sets, as its experience in that business can help it connect the two groups without cookies now, Paparo said. “[LiveRamp] has integrations into every DSP, SSP and platform,” Paparo said. “Having those pipes already laid based on the historical, cookie-based identity gives them a big leg up when someone in the market wants to trial a new system based on authenticated traffic.” However, Reach plc. operates out of the United Kingdom, meaning its privacy standards are regulated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a more rigorous framework than exists in the U.S. Despite the higher level of scrutiny, LiveRamp operates in complete compliance with its regulations, according to Clinger. "Our platform is used by global marketers and publishers in part because of our high standard of privacy and our compliance with all privacy regulations in markets we operate, including GDPR," he said. But privacy advocates caution that passing information on pseudonymous identifiers, a system intended to protect user privacy, could still face scrutiny under European Union law, Paparo said. “It’s a debatable question,” he said. “Privacy advocates think it is not compliant. I will only say that it is not obvious that it is compliant.” Publisher Reach Debuts AI-based Content Recommendation Tool