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Publishers have two principal sources of revenue, subscriptions and advertising revenues. Regardless the degree to which they benefit from subscription revenues, all publishers benefit from increasing the value of their advertising inventory. Some publishers offer targeted advertising, celebrating their high quality first-party data, but even the most advanced publisher is still only going to be capturing static, and typically unverifiable, data. With verifiable demographic data, and dynamic target audience profiles, OwnYou provides data orders of magnitude more valuable.

Only half of the money spent by advertisers actually ends up with publishers. The advertising supply chain is dominated by monopolies and bloated with service providers. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that intermediaries (of which Google is the largest) captured at least 35% of the value of advertising bought from newspapers and other content providers in the UK.

Programmatic advertising addresses the following problem set; how do publishers without the ability to sell inventory directly to brands, or with residual inventory, maximize the value of their inventory? Conversely, how do advertisers without access to, or the budget for, direct purchases of high-quality inventory, maximize the return on their advertising budgets?

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?

Advertisers have found themselves on the wrong side of the privacy debate. Whether the allegation points to surveillance or predatory advertising, or to suggestions of personal data harvesting without consent, advertisers need to recalibrate the narrative and change the way they use personal data to develop new audiences and foster new consumer relationships.

When it comes to digital identity service, what are individuals most influenced by? Ease of use, reliability, control, clarity and safety. In a word, OwnYou.

Individuals want to protect their privacy and regain control of their personal data. Privacy regulations have relied heavily on consent, leading to a pop-up nightmare. Presented with disclaimers every time they visit a website, consumers cannot be expected to make an informed decisions. At the same time, a blanket ban on sharing any data results in no personalisation and an inferior experience.

Individuals have no control over how their personal data is used or shared. 87% of consumers surveyed believe it is important to purchase goods from brands and retailers that understand the “real me”, and most consumers embrace the use of personalisation. However few consumers want their personal data misused.

A stateless Internet requires a programmatic solution to identity management and tracking. Identity is important to the consumer experience, providing access to customized content and targeted advertising. Abusing an individual’s personal data by ignoring their right to anonymity and denying them control over what about themselves, and their behavior, is shared with whom, has led to consumer and regulator push back. The pendulum is about to swing in the opposite direction with all personal data ring-fenced. At the extreme, that either means no customization, a torrent of irrelevant information, and an inferior consumer experience, or walled garden operators becoming even more anti-competitive.

Good user data tells a story. At the heart of any effective programmatic advertising solution lies detailed and reliable data on a consumer’s demographics, their preferences, and their interests. High quality personal data helps profile consumers, predict their response to an advert and optimise how they are targeted. However, effective personal data is not static. It flows throughout the supply chain, across publishers, service providers, platforms, and advertisers, all the while describing consumer behaviour, reactions to different advertising campaigns and, ultimately, the consumption journey.

Soon after the Internet moved from the academic to the popular domain, banner advertising followed (1994). Media operators initially sold their inventory directly to media buyers and advertisers but, as the number of web pages exploded, so did the amount of display advertising inventory. It soon made sense to serve display ads via dedicated centralized ad servers operated by the likes of DoubleClick.

Regulations are complex and evolving, with an emphasis on consent, how users control their data, and how their data is used.