VideoAmp has released a cookie-less identity tool meant to help boost advertisers’ confidence in their advanced audience targeting.
The new “commingled” tool aims to provide a comprehensive repository of accurate data by integrating identity assets from multiple providers. This shows “average measurement match rate increases of 79% on pixels and 60% for clean rooms versus a solution based on a single provider alone,” according to the announcement.
Navigating the shifting privacy regulations and the phase-out of third-party cookies, the offering uses clean room tech across identifiers such as hashed emails, signed-in users and device IDs so that a consumer’s identifiers are never revealed to VideoAmp, its partners or clients.
“I characterize multisourcing identity as the wisdom of the crowd,” VideoAmp Chief Measurability Officer Josh Chasin told StreamTV Insider.
VideoAmp has maintained a strong trajectory in the audience measurement space. Alongside iSpot, it was certified as currency for advanced audiences earlier this year by NBCUniversal. The company also inked a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) at the start of the year providing a full suite of measurement data and capabilities across the company’s linear, streaming and digital portfolio. A few months later, WBD enlisted VideoAmp and Comscore as alternative currencies for the year's Upfront season. VideoAmp is also one of three measurement vendors that in September passed the initial certification phase by the U.S. Joint Industry Committee for its data to serve as cross-platform currency for TV ad buying and selling.
Also in September, VideoAmp laid off 10% of its workforce “quietly” the day after announcing a $150 million funding round as reported by outlets like Axios and AdAge. Chasin explained the decision was “about focusing on API delivery as opposed to front-end engineering… we laid off front end basically,” adding that they are currently hiring in other areas.
Cookie-less momentum
VideoAmp’s platform adds to a growing number of players going cookie-less in the targeting space.
Dstillery, a company leveraging machine learning (ML) for ID-free audience targeting, recently brought its cookie-less Custom AI platform into the CTV market. And Comscore made its move into the space when its business unit tailored to programmatic targeting, Proximic, dropped a trio of AI-powered tools allowing advertisers to target ID-free audiences contextually across platforms without using cookies.
But for all of the focus on a cookie-less future, Chasin said, currently, the real focal point should be on identity. “We have all gotten very enamored [by] big data as the revolution… We've gotten so excited about [it] that we all, as an industry, kind of gloss over how important identity is.”
Whereas “data is data” from Chasin’s perspective, identity is “the spine” that provides audience understanding — it is also the single greatest source of potential error.
He referenced research from the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) in 2021 that found there was a high degree of error in matching the demographic classification for any one identity source. Furthermore, underrepresented demographic segments were more likely to have matching errors. Using collected studies from Nielson and Truthset, the report stated that multicultural consumers were one-and-a-half to two times more likely to be suppressed and misclassified than White Non-Hispanic identity data.
“This is a wake-up call, if one was needed, that you can’t build an identity solution based on one provider and do a good enough job of boiling out as much error as possible,” Chasin said. “I cannot overstate the importance of identity as the linchpin for everything that happens with big data.”