In Pursuit of Ad Revenue, CafeMedia Partners With LiveRamp’s Data Clean Room, Safe Haven

Publisher ad management outfit CafeMedia, which manages the tech and sales for titles like MacRumors and Thought Catalog, is working with tech platform LiveRamp to offer its data clean room Safe Haven solution to the millions of readers across CafeMedia’s 4,000 creators' sites. The move will ultimately lead to higher publisher ad revenues. This expands CafeMedia’s work with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), which lets marketers buy authenticated inventory on the open market without relying on third-party identifiers. Safe Haven—now the preferred data clean room for CafeMedia, which helps marketers securely match their first-party data with that of publishers—builds on top of ATS and aims to offer wider audience reach for marketers across CafeMedia's publishers, growing their ad revenue. “A lot of clean room solutions are very marketer focused and therefore, have a lot of use cases handled for them,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer of CafeMedia. “This opens up a lot more possibilities for how [publishers] can activate on a campaign and make it work.” To Grow This Year, Data Clean Rooms Shoot for Interoperability There’s a smorgasbord of data clean rooms in the market. This announcement comes as the industry is aiming to solve marketers’ signal loss woes, often putting the burden of tech integrations onto publishers as the clock ticks on cookie demise. "Partnering with CafeMedia to unlock these use cases will help extend marketers' performance across the open internet while promoting fairness and trust for publishers and consumers,” said Travis Clinger, svp of activations and addressability at LiveRamp. Solving for interoperability While the industry is solving for clean rooms to be more interoperable—a term that is becoming a catch-all in the debate around data clean rooms—Safe Haven advances interoperability for publishers who generally work with several marketers and sit on troves of valuable data. “If you're a marketer, you can pick one clean room for your data and tell everybody else to come to you,” said Bannister. “Whereas for a publisher, you can't lock yourself into a single solution.” LiveRamp’s integrations across most supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms make interoperability possible across the ecosystem, according to Clinger. This means if a marketer wants to activate a deal via a particular SSP, working with CafeMedia will let it use any of Safe Haven’s integrations across the ecosystem, letting marketers reach a wider audience. If we make money then LiveRamp makes money, and marketers are getting results. And that’s win win win.Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer, CafeMedia Solving for interoperability was a differentiating factor for CafeMedia, who spoke with several other cleanroom solutions in the market before working with LiveRamp. Overall, said Clinger, working with Safe Haven will open up more opportunities, data, and more efficient buying for both the marketer and the publisher. And as more data clean rooms look to become interoperable, any of LiveRamp’s partners, as recently seen in its partnership with Snowflake, will have access to CafeMedia’s audience as well. Data activation and collaboration fees Currently, publishers and marketers working with data clean rooms pay a monthly or annual fee to access the privacy-focused tools. This proves to be an expensive investment for publishers, who usually need to partner with several clean rooms to make it more appetizing to marketers. However, with Safe Haven publishers pay fees only when there is a data activation. “It makes a lot of sense, if we make money then LiveRamp makes money, and marketers are getting results. And that’s win win win,” said Bannister. Although LiveRamp and CafeMedia wouldn't share specific commercials, Clinger told Adweek that LiveRamp doesn’t get a media rate on its brand side, but instead charges marketers data collaboration fees for activating their data across the ecosystem. Eliminating third-party identity providers LiveRamp’s ATS technology helps monetize authenticated who log in through a publisher’s site by providing their email address, in this case, CafeMedia, according to Clinger. LiveRamp then hashes this information into a cryptographic ID, known as RampID, creating a series of numbers and letters. "Because it's based on RampID, you can activate a campaign without having to actually send personally identifiable information (PII) into the clean room," said Bannister. "It's one less place that you need to be putting any sort of PII which always has risks associated with it," he added. Publishers have been wary of any PII in the open exchange leading to data leakage. Cookie-Alternative Fledge Testing Grows, But Not Among SSPs This makes a combination of the ATS technology and Safe Haven a safety differentiator for marketers and publishers while activating both RampID and ATS inventory, the platform said. “Other data clean rooms have to work with a third-party identity provider for this,” said Clinger. But “our customers, marketers and publishers will be able to use our clean room technologies with our existing ecosystem integrations.”