Is ‘Data Mapping’ selling my audience?

As more and more publishers consider ‘data mapping’, one of the main points of debate is whether data mapping amounts to a publisher “selling” its audience data to an exchange.

It does not:  there are crucial differences between partnering with a data mapping company like LiveRamp and selling your proprietary audience data to a behavioral exchange.

What are audience data exchanges?

Centralized data exchanges were created to allow advertisers and publishers to easily access useful, anonymous user data to serve more relevant ads to consumers.

Publishers can purchase data from an exchange or place their own audience data into the exchange, enabling other parties to use the data to target ad campaigns across the web. Publisher data can be sold as unbranded (i.e. these are newspaper readers) or branded (i.e. these are users who read this named newspaper).  For a publisher, these exchanges represent a way to monetize their anonymous on-site user behavior.

For those at AdMonsters OPS in NYC on October 6th, you may have seen Steven Goldberg of HomeAway give a great example (http://www.admonsters.com/session/focus-session-data-revenue-channel/86291) of how to work with a leading data platform like Exelate to successfully take advantage of audience data.

What is Data Mapping?

Data mapping helps publishers to place, or “map”, third-party offline demographic data into anonymous cookies across a publisher’s online audience. By mapping demographic data into anonymous cookies through email or registration pages, publishers are able to protect their own audience data while simultaneously increasing the overlap of third-party demographic data with their audience and earning a new revenue stream.

The data mapping process should always respect users’ privacy and browsing habits.  LiveRamp’s data mapping, for instance, never collects users’ cross-site browsing data, never uses publisher audience data in its database, and never places PII in the cookie itself.  Additionally, publishers must provide notice and choice to consumers when engaging in this process.

In the fast moving ad ecosystem, publishers may be nervous about issues such as channel conflict and data theft.  When working with data exchanges, publishers sometimes find that the revenue they earn from monetizing audience data is not greater (or is only marginally greater) than the revenue they lose when other advertisers target their own audience on other sites, bypassing premium buys on their own site.

Data mapping eliminates publisher concerns about protecting their proprietary information, and the value of their web property and audience. With data mapping, a publisher’s audience behavior data is never collected or sold on an exchange, so it can’t used by other advertisers.  Likewise, the third-party demographic data (age, lifestyle, income, etc) that is brought online and sold on the exchange as a result of data mapping on a publisher’s site is neither proprietary to the publisher, nor a cannibalization of  -- or a competitor to -- any publisher user data.  To the contrary, publishers receive a number of benefits from data mapping: it allows direct advertisers to target ads using increased overlap and depth of demographic data through capabilities provided by a publisher’s DMP, and it increases the value of a publisher’s remnant inventory by encoding its audience with valuable demographic data, leading to higher CPM bids from remnant buyers.

All data management decisions for online publishers should be considered carefully and thoroughly.  If you do decide to engage in audience selling, you should work with a leading data management platform or data exchange that can help you optimize the results.  If you are wary about audience selling but still want to increase demographic data overlap for your sales teams within as well as earn new revenue, we encourage you to consider data mapping. 

Jeff Richman is Director of Marketing at LiveRamp, a division of Rapleaf, Inc.

Don't miss AdMonsters OPS Markets, London, February 9, 2012

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