As cookies decline, three adtech companies are pushing into connected TV
As third-party cookies go away and more people cut the cord, three adtech companies are looking to shore up their connected TV businesses.
Beeswax and Beachfront Media are using LiveRamp's identity product in connected TV
Advertisers have less than two years left to use third-party cookies to target users on the open web. Connected TV doesn’t support cookies, but the relatively new medium lacks a standard way of identifying viewers and building audiences.
Beeswax and Beachfront Media will start using LiveRamp’s identity product, Identity Link (IDL), for connected TV campaigns, building on their existing use of IDL for desktop and mobile campaigns.
An advertiser running a campaign hands over some of its first-party data to LiveRamp, which then matches that data with its household graph to create a consistent ID, or IDL, for a given user. LiveRamp then passes that IDL to a demand-side platform or supply-side platform, which uses that identifier, instead of a cookie, to execute a buy.
“There isn't a cookie or a similar unique ID that's persistent [in CTV], so being able to use first-party data is a really big breakthrough,” said Ari Paparo, chief executive officer of Beeswax.
Paparo said CTV currently makes up 10%-15% of the business for Beeswax, a demand-side platform.
Beachfront Media, a supply-side platform for video ads, has over 160 publisher partners, including Philo, Cheddar and Frontier Communications.
Ad spend on CTV is expected to surpass $10bn by 2021, according to eMarketer, but the myriad of platforms with inconsistent identifiers make advertising a challenge.
“Right now, it’s very fractured,” said Daniel Church, Beachfront Media’s director of programmatic. “So it really makes it hard for a buyer in… connected TV because the targeting ability on each [platform] varies.”
Both ends of the supply path transacting on the same ID should make buying CTV campaigns easier for advertisers, but digital buyers used to one-to-one targeting across desktop and mobile will have to get used to the broader household level targeting of television.
“Targeting is a little bit looser, because you have to target based on that household data,” said Church.