The following is a guest contributed post by Keith Petri, Chief Strategy Officer, US, at Screen6

Ad tech is struggling to transition to a state of full maturity, and that’s largely due to the continued acceptance of half-truths and inadequate technological shortcuts. As an industry, we need to demand better, and we need to hold vendors accountable to the claims they make. “Cross-device” is not a term that was made up for marketing materials. It’s a legitimate need among marketers today, and the entire supply chain needs to begin treating it as such.

The truth is that cross-device is being inadequately addressed by many players within the marketing industry, and the vast majority of companies that say they’re enabling cross-device are either openly lying or seriously bending the truth. Why are industry players obscuring the truth about cross-device? Quite simply, because they can.

A Culture of Box-Checking

DSPs and SSPs know they need to be able to list “cross-device” among their capabilities. Unfortunately, most platforms right now are only doing the bare minimum to be able to check this box for their clients.

When marketers say “cross-device,” they mean they want to be able to identify an individual across their various devices and tailor their ad experiences based on knowledge of this individual. But this isn’t the idealistic definition that’s being applied to their campaigns.

Most platforms are currently hacking the concept of cross-device. Some of them do this through simple IP matching, where they tie multiple devices to a single profile based on their use of the same IP address. But IP addresses are not identifiers for individuals. Not even close. These addresses can, but rarely, represent a single device, a router or even a cell tower communication channel. Many people and devices—computers, cell phones, streaming video players, etc.—can communicate over a single IP address, even simultaneously. These addresses can’t be used to identify an individual. They can’t even reliably be used to identify a household.

Many platforms also mislead marketers when they claim to have access to certain cross-device audiences. Let’s say a platform claims to have an auto intenders segment across mobile and desktop. That’s cross-device, right? Not necessarily. It’s more likely that this given audience segment includes auto intenders on mobile and auto intenders on desktop—but they’re not the same people. The mobile audience members are entirely distinct from the individuals who are using their desktops.

DSPs and SSPs today don’t have an interest in building out true cross-device capabilities because they’re not being incentivized to do so, nor are they being penalized for not doing so. This brings us to another deficiency in the marketplace: attribution and verification providers that aren’t accurately measuring cross-device activity.

The Attribution Deficiency

Marketers are partnering with any number of attribution and verification providers today in order to understand the effect of their media spends and ensure all of their supply-chain partners are delivering what they say they’re doing. Such third-party monitoring is designed to keep DSPs and SSPs on the straight and narrow, but that’s not happening in the realm of cross-device. That’s because most verification vendors aren’t handling cross-device attribution appropriately – if at all.

Attribution and verification vendors understand that marketers today are looking for multi-touch attribution solutions that account for cross-device activity. But, like the platforms, they’re only taking bare-bones steps to check the right boxes. Most of them do, in fact, measure activity across channels, but they’re not connecting the activity on different channels and devices to an individual. They’re measuring IDs, not people. Unfortunately, every ID represents only a fraction of a given person.

The marketing industry has been talking about the need and the promise of cross-device for a long time, and rightfully so. I think we can all agree that the need to create seamless experiences for customers and prospects across their ever-multiplying devices is a topic worthy of discussion.

But here’s the problem: thanks to the amount of time we’ve spent heralding the importance of cross-device over the past five years, most advertisers have come to believe that we’ve solved for it. And we haven’t. Not by a long shot.

The post Cross-Device Isn’t As Adopted As You Think appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by David De Jong, CEO and Founder, Screen6

It’s hard to go a day in our industry without stumbling across a news or opinion piece related to “The Duopoly.” You’ve no doubt heard everyone’s favorite stats about their combined potential. That is, together, Google and Facebook accounted for about two-thirds of U.S. digital ad revenues in 2017. And virtually all of the growth in digital ad spend is going directly into the pockets of the two titans.

Every time I see a Duopoly headline, an old Dutch proverb springs to mind: “Twee honden vechten om een been en de derde gaat er mee heen.” The proverb loosely translates to, “When two dogs fight over a bone, a third one carries it away.”

At present, all eyes in our industry are searching for that third dog – the one that will stealthily creep in to snatch the bone away from Google and Facebook as they bite and wrestle each other. And, in fact, a favored hound has already emerged from the lurking pack: Amazon.

All Eyes on Amazon

The Amazon obsession – which, quite frankly, might be taking up more headline space than the Duopoly obsession right now – is completely understandable and warranted. If ever there was a dog well-positioned to steal a bone, it’s Amazon.

Consider that Amazon is uniquely positioned as it relates to the consumer, and the consumer is the end game. While Google and Facebook squabble over media spend, Amazon is already in possession of the all important direct consumer relationship. Sure, Google knows about consumer intent, and Facebook knows about consumer interests. But nobody is more embedded in the consumer’s actual life than Amazon, because in reality, they are the only ones who actually sell to consumers.

Amazon not only knows what people shop for and purchase day to day (and that data is immensely powerful), but it also struts through the consumer’s front door on an increasingly regular basis. With its acquisition of Whole Foods, it’s going to be making itself even more at home in the consumer’s kitchen. Amazon’s relationship with the consumer is unmatched, and there’s tremendous power in that.

That said, while Amazon is a powerhouse that’s going to continue to redefine entire industries, it’s not necessarily poised to overtake Google and Facebook on media spend. Globally, eMarketer estimates that Amazon brought in $1.81 billion in ad revenue in 2017, with about $1.65 billion of that coming from the U.S. Compare that to Google’s estimated $35 billion and Facebook’s $17 billion in the U.S. last year, and we see how far Amazon has to go to be a real threat on ad spend.

Yes, Amazon’s ad revenues are growing at a faster clip than that of the Duopoly, but that doesn’t mean Amazon is intent on hyper-growth in this area. Its current growth is healthy, stable, and impressive. But it’s a long way from being an ad spend disruptor, and Amazon has other fish to fry.

The Third Dog Is Still in the Shadows

While our industry has plenty of reasons to keep its eyes on Amazon, there’s likely a different third challenger out there, poised to carry away the bone as the other two fight. And that third dog is most likely still unknown to us.

When a new contender does emerge, it will come in an unlikely shape. The Duopoly giants aren’t the only companies sitting on treasure troves of consumer data and sophisticated tech stacks. In that regard, major telecoms like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast make for interesting third-dog contenders.

In addition, shifting our perspective on what the actual bone represents opens up an entirely new array of possibilities as it relates to Google and Facebook threats. While many are focusing on competitors as it relates to their current share of media spend, I think the more interesting consideration is who has the biggest share of the media planner’s attention.

In that regard, there are plenty of players in the marketplace whose relationships with brand decision makers are much deeper and more trusted than those of Facebook and Google. And there is power in those relationships. Today management consultancies like EY, Accenture, IBM and Deloitte are making huge inroads as trusted marketing partners, while marketing and advertising technology companies like Salesforce, Oracle and SAP are upping their relationships with brands as well. Then, of course, you have the agencies, who have long served as trusted brand advisers — WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu, Interpublic. These entities are industry powerhouses in their own right. Any one of them—or better yet, a combination of them—are in the position to make serious industry waves with a well-placed power move.

Let us not forget that 10 years ago, The Duopoly wasn’t even a blip on our industry radar. Disruption in digital marketing happens fast, and the next headline darling – that third dog, if you will – could come from the place you least expect.

The post The Duopoly Breaker Won’t Be Who You Expect appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Keith Petri, Screen6, Chief Strategy Officer

At Screen6, we have long believed that the solutions in place for cross-device tracking require a fresh set of eyes. It is important that the entire industry that has become reliant on cross-device identification, from buyers to sellers to data processors, understand exactly how any cross-device vendor’s graph is built. This will assure that they can have total confidence in their claims regarding the strength of connections across consumers and devices.

We also believe that marketers need to keep asking questions about the effectiveness of the solutions in market and the quality of the data. Question your current cross-device vendor and question new potential partners, but do not limit yourself to predetermined questions with predefined acceptable answers. In short, asking the right questions will result in better cross-device solutions.

Match rates measure the overall effectiveness of the ID synchronization process – determining that cookie A within a pool belongs to the same person as cookie B from another pool. High match rates between cookies suggest that a particular graph will be more effective and provide access to a larger online audience than a graph with low match rates. Today, match rates between asynchronous cookie pools are what the industry relies on to determine the effectiveness of most cross-device ID vendors. Not all vendors work this way, but some providers still depend on syncing disparate cookie pools.

Marketers use these match rates as a method of validation and comparison among these types of master device graph providers. To truly understand match rates, marketers need to be asking about the types of data that go into a graph, how the match rate claim is calculated and who is vetting the claim. Most importantly we need to consider how fresh the data is and how frequently a graph is updated and sent to clients.

Currently, most cross-device providers build and send their ID graphs to clients once every seven to ten days. This timeline and overall approach to providing actionable data is a core issue that impacts the match rates in cross-device identification, if they define match rates correctly. How big this problem of data freshness and cookie decay rates poses is something we have unique insight into.

We studied trillions of server-to-server events to conduct this analysis. Every day we process each of our clients’ datasets for not only the past 24 hours, but looking back over a variable amount of time. As such, we can identify the cookie (ID) depreciation rate. While some vendors have cookies with significantly higher longevity in lifespan (i.e. >14 days), our analysis shows that the average half-life of cookies across the billions we see daily and trillions we see monthly is 6 to 8 days.

With the average half-life sitting around 1-week, cookies depreciate at the same rate which the average cross-device vendor refreshes its graph associations. If you see a new user on Monday, and a cross-device vendor who only refreshes its graph weekly, on Sundays, returns an updated mapping file the next day (Monday, one-week later) – then what percentage of the graph is actually viable to be leveraged for targeting?

Marketers today need to think both in real-time and in 24-hour increments, reconsidering how often they review and manage data and their campaigns. The chain of old and bad data will have a negative impact on campaign results. We encourage clients to look into their ID graphs and examine the percentage of the graph which matches not just to inventory which they have seen, but inventory which they see after the delivery date of the graph. This is an analysis that most platforms find surprising.

Advertising technology prides itself on advancing the field; everything from profiling and segment creation to ad serving and tracking. Our job is to create new solutions that meet the new demands of the market and the job of marketers is to ask the questions that cut through false claims about bad data, old data and match rates and dig into the core attributes of a cross-device graph.

The post Data Freshness is at the Core of Cross-Device Accuracy appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Keith Petri, Chief Strategy Officer of Screen6.

It appears that Facebook has some imaginary friends. That is, according to industry analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group, who recently called out Facebook for misleading the market on what its actual reach is. According to Facebook’s claims, there are 41 million adults between the ages of 18 and 24. Weiser points out that according to data from the latest U.S. census, there are only 31 million adults in that age group. The same exaggeration in reach also holds true for other groups, including the next most-targeted group of 25 to 34-year-olds.

According to Facebook, reach estimates are based on a number of inputs, including user behaviors, user demographics, location data from devices, and other factors. While Facebook claims that their figures are “not designed to match population or census estimates,” this inflation is likely happening for a simple reason – they do not know which devices belong to which people and, for that matter, which users are actually real.

At the core of this issue is the reliance on falsely declared, so-called “deterministic data.” Despite recent efforts to get its users to supply their real personal data, Facebook is still almost entirely dependent on users to self-report their age, sex, location and other information. There is nothing to stop people from creating fake personas or profiles. And the big question is: how many profiles are fake? Some say as many as 140 million.

This issue is not unique to Facebook. The fallacy of accurate self-identified data is all around us. How many of us of have logged onto the internet at a hotel and put in John@Smith.com? It’s the same when consumers fill out forms with bogus information — fake names and phone numbers and even fake zip codes like 12345.

The effects of false deterministic data can be far-reaching. Deloitte recently released a report, entitled “Predictably inaccurate: The prevalence and perils of bad big data”, which revealed that half of all data on most consumers is inaccurate and one of the main reasons is self-reported data.

These far-reaching claims are just the latest issue for Facebook who has seen its share of bad press for miscalculations, fake news and other worries that have some of the biggest advertisers in the world questioning how much they should spend on the platform. When you are one of the largest digital advertising platforms in the world, you have the responsibility to be accurate.

Facebook, however, reportedly has 20 different third-party audit partners and, in its explanation for the massive discrepancy, rejected the notion it had done anything wrong. But many in the industry are saying that Facebook has real reason to embrace a much greater level of transparency. Facebook is undeniably good at scale, but buyers will call into question scale if they don’t trust the numbers. And it’s incredibly easy to sniff test data to make sure it is accurate. To help address this, Facebook rolled out new brand safety tools at Dmexco in Germany that gives advertisers access to where ads are likely to appear ahead of a campaign, as well as placements bought via its third-party partner, Audience Network.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to sound data. Whether you are a brand advertiser spending money on Facebook or a data processor, everyone will agree that accuracy is the new name of the game. Bad data leads to poor targeting, inflated metrics and wasted media dollars which could easily result in a trust issue that the digital industry simply can’t afford.

The post When it Comes to Reach – Accuracy Counts appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Screen6

MAW notes that the partnerships include Airpush, ShareThis, and Kochava Collective.

“Unlike other cross-device vendors, Screen6 maintains strict silos to store each of its clients’ datasets and does not own or license any of its own data to augment its clients’ graphs,” the Screen6 team says. “Without a centralized master graph to rely on, Screen6 does not require a cookie-sync with each of its clients. Screen6’s technology is able to work with data passed server-to-server since each cookie pool is de-duplicated within its own environment. Thus, Screen6 can process data and build private identity solutions for its licensees across all geographies while abiding by local legislation and industry self-regulation.”

Some clients require supplemental data to fill holes in their own dataset. A well-established desktop platform, for example, may want to extend into mobile. With Screen6’s Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) motto, the platform will now be able to leverage in-app data from the Kochava Collective and AirPush to bridge the gap.

Seth Socolow, SVP Strategic Partnerships at Airpush, says his company — a leading global mobile advertising platform — is optimistic about partnering with Screen6 “to give cross device buyers an opportunity to reach their audiences on desktop web, mobile web, or in-app.”

“Screen6 brings a differentiated technology and business model to the cross-device space and we look forward to working together,” Socolow adds.

The post Screen6 Partners with Airpush, Kochava Collective, ShareThis to Boost Data Offering appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.