Lotame's Online Identifier Is the Latest to Gain Adoption

Another day, another identifier. Lotame is seeing adoption of its Panorama ID, the ad-tech outfit's answer to the deprecation of third-party cookies. Publisher Advance Local is supporting the ID, while Magnite and Sovrn are among the first supply-side platforms passing along Lotame’s identifier. Lotame is among a handful of vendors pushing an identity product in what’s becoming an increasingly competitive marketplace. The Trade Desk is pushing wide-scale adoption of Unified ID 2.0, its open-source product, while other vendors like ID5 are also signing on publishers for their identifiers. David Rowley, Advance Local’s senior director of customer success for ad platform strategies, said the company is “doubling down” on developing multiple identity partnerships. So while Lotame’s Panorama ID will be a key component in the publisher’s programmatic and direct-sold businesses, Advance Local will still onboard other identity solutions in order to attract marketers. “We feel like we need to have multiple partnerships in place from an identity perspective to help the ecosystem almost create itself,” Rowley said. “In order to get buyers to buy against an ID, they need to see enough scale from us on the publishing side, so we feel like we are doing our part to create that market, to create as many partnerships as we can.” Publishers are testing new identifiers to prepare for the demise of third-party cookies—the web trackers foundational to online advertising—that Google will remove from its Chrome browser in early 2022. Lotame offers its Panorama ID for free, taking a “rising tide lifts all boats” approach to finding alternatives to the third-party cookie, said Pierre-Marc Diennet, vp of product management. Still, higher adoption of the Panorama ID means higher revenue, since the enrichment of audience data will happen in Lotame's platform. “We can enrich a profile for an Advance [Local] on things they may not have known about a consumer, and when that transaction ... happens, we're able to enrich a profile. That's how we will be renumerated,” said Andy Monfried, founder and CEO of Lotame. Monfried added that Lotame is open to integrating its Panorama ID “with any and all identity players.” Panorama ID focuses on bringing identity to anonymous web traffic. Instead of relying on email addresses from logged-in users as the backbone of the ID product, Monfried said Panorama ID joins together disparate information to create audience profiles for marketers and publishers. “We believe we are playing in a very unique lane of the anonymous web. We are piecing together the hard part of this problem,” Monfried said. Most online traffic across the open web (outside the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon) is anonymous. Only around 5% of Advance Local’s traffic comes from logged-in visitors. “Like many publishers, we are very much focused on trying to get as [much] authentication as possible,” Rowley said. Advance Local claims it’s the ninth-largest news organization nationally, earning around 52 million monthly unique visitors. Its properties include NJ.com, AL.com and Cleveland.com.