When a company spends money on advertising, they typically want answers to three groups of question; how many people saw the ad and were they the intended audience? Did the campaign perform as expected (brand development or conversion metrics) and did it result in the intended outcomes (purchases, sign-ups etc.)? Were ad impressions and conversions authentic?
Everything we do for advertisers at OwnYou, centres around those three questions which can be summarised as DRA; Data, Results and Authenticity. By providing granular authentic interactions, advertisers can collect very specific data around their audience. By providing granular direct attribution data, from the consumer themselves, attribution is deterministic. With such high-quality inputs, accurate ROAS is not only possible, but unparalleled. All of this because the consumer is driving the agenda. They own the data, they control the relationship, they profit from the interaction. The sharing of information across domains is not only consensual, it is transactional.
Accurate Audience Targeting
Personal Data Payloads (PDPs) contain all the information the consumer is willing to share with the advertiser as well as a one-time identifier to facilitate payment and attribution. PDPs can, at the individuals request, include information around recent domains visited as well as recent campaigns served, to facilitate remarketing and retargeting.
High resolution, timely and tailored attribution
Attribution aims to link consumer actions with advertising outcomes. Attribution requires advertisers link a consumer action, for instance the purchase of a good or service, or the request for a brochure or call-back, with a particular advertising campaign. Linking consumer actions requires data, historically provided by cookies, that help advertisers observe the consumer across different media and devices. Remove cookies from the existing advertising technology stack and you remove all specific user attribution. For smaller businesses, advertising revenue spend is going to be highly dependent on revenues resulting from that spend. In other words, what the advertiser spends on advertising today, is going to depend very much on the revenues they received yesterday, itself a function of the advertising revenues from the day before. The cadence may be a little longer, or even a little shorter, but the point remains; SMBs expect, or perhaps need, near immediate returns on advertising spend which relies on accurate attribution. As we discuss in the section on alternatives to 3rd party cookies, alternative attribution systems are slower, less accurate, and typically rely more on walled garden operators. All in the name of privacy. Which, considering the existing technology stack relies on harvesting data rather than seeking permission and providing control and compensation, is a good thing. But, as we continue to suggest, privacy can be just as much about empowering users to share their data with control, as it is about restricting their data because they have no control. The attribution incentive is so powerful because it is so useful. OwnYou suggests we can leverage advertiser attribution requirements to the benefit of consumers. The global market for loyalty programs is expected to be worth $216bn in 2022. Loyalty programs involve consumers proactively handing over their personal identifiable information to brands in exchange for benefits. That is precisely the relationship we seek to replicate. By building a decentralised platform to facilitate the exchange of information, while retaining control, we help people share their personal data in exchange for relevant advertising and accurate attribution. Advertisers will see their return on advertising increase and individuals will benefit from full transparency, control and compensation.
High resolution attribution is accurate and reliable
A direct relationship with the user, where the user directly benefits from owning and controlling the data, means that should the user decide they want to Monetise their data, they are able to offer deterministically accurate attribution that provides a factual representation of how and when they viewed and interacted with ads.
Attribution options include:
- Last interaction – attribution is awarded to the last impression served.
- First interaction – attribution is awarded to the first impression served.
- Position based attribution – attribution is awarded to a weighted listed of impressions.
- Time-delay attribution – attribution is skewed to more recent impressions.
- Multi-touch or data-driven attribution – considers al touchpoints, from both converters and non-converters.
Online actions we want to capture include visiting a web page, making an online purchase, downloading an app, subscribing to a service, joining a mailing list, viewing a video, signing up for a webinar, requesting a demo, “sharing” a piece of content, making a delayed online purchase on an alternative device.
Not all advertising outcomes result in specific actions
Some outcomes are equally important but less easy to measure, for instance brand development. OwnYou wants to provide a means for individuals to capture feedback for offline brand marking as well direct online advertising. We think out Easter Egg offering, which is primarily a coupon-based offering, might help brands provide users with incentives to capture brand related marketing that had an impact. The app will allow users to take pictures of QR codes on billboards, or other offline media, that had an impact, for a small compensation. We can introduce a lottery element (e.g., there are three QR codes on billboards for Coco Pops cereal in your area that will release a prize in your app, if scanned in the next five days).
Both direct and indirect advertising are common types of online advertising, and companies frequently include both in a particular campaign. We want to make it easier for brands to measure impact, across both types.
Behavioural targeting
Behavioural targeting yields much higher returns for advertisers. Understanding an individual’s suitability to a particular target audience, or understanding an individual’s propensity to purchase, has required user tracking and surveillance. This turns advertising into surveillance driven direct-marketing, and it does not sit well with consumers. It is understandable that privacy advocates and regulator are pushing back. The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act , introduced to the House of Representatives in January 2022, suggests banning all programmatic advertising, other than broad location targeting. In Europe, a recognition that the notice and consent model has failed to deliver an acceptable outcome is very likely to result in a much more restrictive personal data legislation. A recent study , requested by the European Parliament, concludes that while consent has provided the legal basis for targeted advertising, the consent model has been abused as a legal basis for targeted advertising since businesses are able to convince most users to consent to any kind of processing for advertising processes. Furthermore, in February 2022, the Belgian data protection authority (DPA) found that IAB Europe’s transparency and consent framework (TCF) does not comply with GDPR. Amongst several far-reaching findings , the DPA concluded that user preferences collected at the time the user is asked for their consent, when combined with the user’s IP address, was sufficient to indirectly identify a user, and therefore constituted private data. The DPA found that personal data is therefore processed whenever consent is requested, even when the user’s preferences are ultimately to refuse consent for all related processing purposes. They can be little doubt that European legislators intend on introducing new regulations around programmatic advertising. Regulations around how personal data is collected and processed for targeted advertising suggest advertisers will need to consider a new paradigm. One where individuals, and agents directly under their control, manage how their data is used for advertising purposes. Any data processing needs to be managed and controlled by users themselves. How data is shared, with whom and when should all be under the users control. This is what OwnYou proposes. A new user centric model that protects both individuals and advertisers.
Retargeting
Retargeting is the process of serving an ad based on a prior engagement. Site-based targeting is the most common form of retargeting where a user is served ads related to website domains they have previously visited. Initial research suggested a 10.5% increase in purchases. A later Stanford study suggested a 15% increase in purchases from users revisiting a website. Retargeting relies on 3rd party cookies. OwnYou allows individuals to subscribe and monetise retargeting, with a twist. We think consumers should be allowed to subscribe to offline as well as online retargeting. If a user visits a brand website, and then walks into a bricks-and-mortar department store, the brand is going to want the opportunity market to that consumer and the consumer may be willing to accepts a marketing offer.
OwnYou can preserve the individual’s privacy and reconnect them to brands in which they have already shown an interest, when it matters, both online and offline. For more information on OwnYou’s retargeting and attribution workflows, see section 11 – Advertising Workflow and Technology Stack.
Look-a-like audience targeting
Look-a-like audience targeting is used by advertisers to identify individuals who are likely to be interested in their business because they share similar traits to their existing customer base. Facebook makes it easy for advertisers to upload Custom Audiences which are lists of the advertisers best existing customers. This might be customers that spend the most amount of money, or behave in a certain optimal, and typically profitable manner. The advertiser is encouraged to upload “identifiers”, or first party information the advertiser has collected on their customers including email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Facebook then hashes the data and matches it with Facebook profiles allowing the advertiser to use Facebook advertising to reach those customers. However, Facebook also allows the advertiser to target similar people, or look-a-like audiences. This is a very powerful tool. Perhaps not to the taste of all privacy advocates, but extremely valuable to advertisers looking to expand their most profitable audiences.
OwnYou does not pool user data and all underlying architecture works hard to prevent correlation. This necessarily precludes first party data matching, or any other effort to match pseudonymous user profiles with any other data source. That said, it will be possible for advertisers themselves to seek particular user traits that match their own assessment of the ideal target audience, based on factors that they think describe their most profitable users.
Brand Zero Party Data
The safe and compliant collection of personal data. Brand Zero Party Data (BZPD) describes data created by brands related to a specific user, stored by the user. Rather than store personal data in advertiser databases, we make it easy for brands/advertisers to store all personal data with the consumer’s themselves, in their personal data vaults. It will be easy for brands to integrate with OwnYou encrypted personal data vaults (personal data hubs) and to retrieve that data quickly. Brands will be able to query user data across millions of distributed personal data vaults.
