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As advertisers lose more and more classic signals like cookies and MAIDs, adopting effective alternatives for targeting and attribution is more crucial than ever.
In this episode, Vince Voiro, Sr. Director of Connectivity & Ecosystem at LiveRamp, shares the latest on one of these alternative solutions: identity resolution. Together with host Noor Naseer, Voiro explores what identity resolution is, what data is needed to enable it, how it can improve activations and measurement workflows, and more.
Noor Naseer: Hey, this is Noor Naseer for AdTech Unfiltered. Regardless of what Google says, the cookieless future is still knocking on every advertiser's door demanding the adoption of alternative pathways for campaign success. With classic signals continuing to fade fast, Vince Voiro—Head of Agency and Brand Demand Connectivity & Ecosystem at data onboarding and collaboration platform, LiveRamp—says there's never been a more important time to secure new solutions for addressability and measurement. Vince speaks to me about what people know LiveRamp for and what else they need to know about the long-standing adtech and martech solution provider. We discuss what advertisers can do to prepare for a future where addressability as we know it won't look the same anymore and important steps they can take to test, learn and find what works best for their unique needs. Let's get into this episode on planning for the future of addressability and measurement with Vince right now.
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NN: Vince, thanks for joining me today to talk about all things LiveRamp. There's been a ton of activity going on in the addressability space in a cookieless future that we're still looking forward to. So, appreciate you making time to talk about it.
Vince Voiro: Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
NN: There are probably still folks out there who don't even have a baseline premise of LiveRamp. I know it's shocking—if you've been working in the adtech space, it's very likely that you do, but do you want to give me like your 30 second introduction to LiveRamp?
VV: Yeah, I think a lot of people who do know us know us as like an onboarding company. So, we take data and connect it with the platform that they're looking to send it to. But LiveRamp in itself does a lot more than that. We have a collaboration platform where we're working with brands and other partners to be able to share data in a privacy-safe, compliant way. We have measurement solutions that we help to support. So, LiveRamp does a lot of things in the ecosystem, but mainly you can view us as the connective tissue. We're helping to drive connections whether it's for collaboration, measurement, or activation across the ecosystem with all the different partners that are out there.
NN: So, the latest that people are primarily concerned with as we think more and more about the cookieless future is what should I be doing differently and how might I be approaching solution providers, including LiveRamp, differently. So, I think the big thing that we've been hearing from you all more recently has been about identity resolution. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about identity resolution as a mechanism for the cookieless future? Let's just start there and get that framework going.
VV: Yeah, so I think the idea of identity resolution, connectivity, and addressability all play really well together. The basics behind identity resolution is understanding who those consumers are that you're looking to target, regardless of which identifier you're trying to find them using.
So, traditionally, identity resolution for us was understanding who the offline individual is then connected to the online version. And obviously the focus there was cookies and MAIDs and other identifiers. The focus for us today in addition to cookies and MAIDs is using the Ramp identifier to understand who those people are. And the way we think about identity resolution is it's not just who is that person as an email, but it's collectively what are all of the email addresses? What is the first name and last name and postal address that's tied to that person, and how can we connect all of that to a single identifier where possible to allow you to address that person regardless of what information you come to us with it and what information they're providing to the end provider?
So, ultimately we want to generate the connection that allows you to address that individual, even if you may not have collected the same information as the partner on the other side.
NN: How often are you finding that advertisers are prepared to bring those different data elements to the table to build a really robust identity resolution system for themselves?
VV: I think obviously what vertical you're in and what type of data you have access to dictates the quality that you're able to present to us, but I also think that there's a misconception of what data is best suited for identity resolution.
The backbone of what we do at LiveRamp is really rooted in offline to start off with. So: first name, last name, postal address and the 50 plus years of data that's tied to that, but if you're coming to us with just email that's okay; that is definitely something we can work with. So, I think understanding what data assets you have as a brand or as a partner and then how you can utilize them is really the first step before you even jump into the idea of identity resolution, because the quality of your input is going to directly dictate the quality of the output. So, we want to understand what you have at your disposal and then we can come to you and let you know how that plays into what we do at LiveRamp.
NN: How do advertisers that have known LiveRamp historically think about what they can do with identity resolution differently than what they could have done with a LiveRamp let's say five, six, seven years ago?
VV: I think we've transformed the way that we connect data to the open web. So, a lot of the social platforms that we work with, things aren't changing as signals go away. We've always used our connections with them based on PII to allow us to generate who is this individual that the client is sending us to who that individual is on the platform. I’d say identity resolution has changed in the open web when it comes to who is this person that the client has to which cookie is that individual - obviously that's going away. What we've done is we've embedded our IDs and the Ramp IDs into each of the partners in the ecosystem. We've also provided that technology to the publishers in the ecosystem to allow everybody to resolve back to a people-based-identifier rather than relying on these disparate signals of cookies and MAIDs.
I think it's similar concepts, it's just done in a slightly different way and we actually believe it's an improved way of doing it. There's a lot more fidelity in those signals and less data loss. The concept is the same. It's very similar but I think how it has its practical application is maybe a little bit different.
NN: Then something that advertisers are looking for is for maybe in many cases a holy grail solution that's going to fill the void that cookies are going to leave. What won't we be getting from identity resolution? What's impractical for advertisers to be expecting no matter how robust of a data profile they're able to offer to you all in the utilization of your solution?
VV: I think the spirit of the changes really dictate the capability changes. The idea that cookies could passively track somebody across the internet is no longer a thing. We're not looking to recreate a solution that mimics a cookie. We're using authentication, consent-based workflows to generate that connectivity moving forward. I think the major change there is that that individual has to have a relationship with both sides of the equation for us to be able to generate those connections.
I'd also say the gap is, if I go and I create a brand-new Gmail account as an example, it takes time to resolve that data back to the rest of the touch points that we have in our ecosystem. It also takes time for clients of ours to have access to that data whether it's for registration or signups. I think that there is inherently a gap that happens in that type of scenario, but more broadly our ability to connect multiple emails to the same Ramp ID, to the same identifier, allows us to really have a good opportunity to continue to connect at a really high level.
NN: Are there ever scenarios where you know that you suggested that identity resolution can use this myriad of different types of data points and then a client turns back to Vince and says, “But how do I get all this?” Is that ever a question? It's not really your job but that's a part of the earlier part of the relay race but do you ever have to answer that type of question?
VV: Yeah, we do because I think a lot of clients assume that this is like something additional that they need to layer on to what they're already doing and maybe there's a gap in their understanding. They don't necessarily know that this is inherently what you get as part of partnering with LiveRamp.
Our identity resolution is the backbone for our basic products of data onboarding and activation so you're already going to gain access to all of those benefits. What we're then trying to do is extend those benefits across all of the different partners and all of the different workflows. So, you may be using them in an activation workflow, but what about all your measurement workflows? How can you benefit from identity resolution when it comes to measurement? I think that's where we spend a lot of time is refocusing and letting them know that this is something you already have access to. There's just more ways you can use it, more ways you can benefit from everything that you already are contracted for.
NN: Are there any other solution providers that fall into a space that also is qualified as identity resolution?
VV: Yeah, you know there's other partners out there like the Experians, the Axioms, the Transunions of the world. I think a lot of those other partners have similar elements to the way that they do things, but everybody has different data assets, different processes and different rules that underlie the setup and what that they provide.
I think for us, one of the major differentiators is that we have the ability to do identity resolution as an input, but then we have such strong connective tissue as an output for activation that ultimately that makes a major difference in the way that we can interact with our clients. I also think our network is really strong. From a collaboration standpoint we have environments that we can support collaboration in. We also are interoperable with outside environments if that's the way that brands choose to collaborate.
We're agnostic to the way that they go about doing these things and, ultimately, I think that provides a ton of value. You come to us with a solution you've already built. We figure out a way that we can integrate with that rather than forcing you into a more narrow solution. I think that's one of the real benefits of LiveRamp.
NN: Just to expand on something-- I heard you say something like this; as far as having a sort of an expansive network or many different ways to work with you, what have you had to do internally to make yourself so accessible and flexible to work in different ways? Is it building a lot of different types of partnerships, integrations? Can you just expand on what labor you all have done so that you can be easy to work with?
VV: Yeah, so I put it into three buckets, and you listed two of them. I think the partnership element of it is huge: Partnering with Snowflake and AWS and all those cloud providers to allow us to gain access to their platforms. The integrations to build our technology natively into those applications and to allow our brands to directly connect to things that they're using within our platform today. And then I'd say acquisition is the third part. Our recent acquisition of Habu allows brands to expand those use cases. So, if you were using Databricks and we didn't have an integration with them, Habu does. So, it adds in these additional elements that maybe we hadn't generated the partnership or generated the integration yet. They may have some of those, which actually allows us to be more flexible. So, I'd say those are the three ways that we're going about doing that.
NN: I'm going to bounce back to asking about the data piece. There are advertisers out there that really struggle with the collection of first-party data. It's just not as natural for them to be doing a lot of collection, especially if they've historically been using third-party cookie data or other types of data sourcing that has helped them do some really precise types of targeting. How do you help those kinds of advertisers that are just never going to have this really robust profile of first-party data, but are still looking to understand how to work with you?
VV: Yeah, I think we are trying to reset the expectation of what first-party data is and how you can collect it. Everybody assumes that this means you have to generate a login when somebody visits the website for the first time; and sure, that will help but we also understand the downside of doing it. So, we try to present them with a large number of different ways that they can generate authentications whether it's whitepapers or blogs or downloads.
Then the other thing for those that have a ton of trouble is, can you present the consumer with an ‘or’ scenario? And what I mean by that is, they can access this whitepaper or you can have it emailed to you. So, it doesn't necessarily blockade any information. It gives the consumer options, but it also presents the opportunity for the brand or the client to generate some first-party data. I think knowing that we've seen different ways it could be implemented, and then relying on information back to brands who are having a tough time implementing strategies, is definitely something that we try to do. We work with four or 500 different brands, so we see a lot out there. I think a lot of these brands are very focused on what they're doing. We can provide some of those consulting ideas as well.
NN: Vince, what does LiveRamp bring to the table for aiding with measurement, specifically for understanding conversion metrics?
VV: We do a lot with measurement as part of our connection with the end platform for activation. We can also bring data back into our platform and deliver it to whatever measurement partner or environment that brands are looking to do that with. So, converting all of your data to a single identifier, the Ramp ID, and doing measurement. So, you pull in your conversion data, you pull in your impression data, and you join those together in that privacy-safe way, and it gives you the flexibility to understand how well your media is operating—but also to generate new audiences to then connect that data back out for activation. So that's kind of full funnel. Where that's not possible, we've generated partnerships with the different conversion APIs to allow brands to share their data with those partners in a privacy-safe way.
We're going wherever the partner needs us to go if the client is interested in doing that but we're also trying to provide the flexibility to do more individual measurement where possible.
NN: Holistically speaking, where have you observed advertisers being overall too casual or too optimistic about the cookieless future? When I ask that question, what I mean is they're just waiting for things to sort out and may not be doing a lot of exploration with you and/or other partners to really prepare themselves for what the final flicker of that cookie full light is bringing to them and their media plans.
VV: Yeah, I think there's a couple of thoughts that brands bring to us and it's like you know, is this actually going to happen? Do we really need to worry about this because we don't know if the end is actually going to happen? We think it is. We think that each delay makes that a little bit more challenging to convey that, to have that brand have faith in the end result here, but we do think it's going to happen. We think that the more work a brand puts in up front to set up all those workflows and better understand what the impact is going to be, the better off they are in the long run. Not to mention the fact that there's benefits in the near-term. Fifty percent of the web is already cookieless. You're already missing out on a relatively large section of the internet today.
So how can these different products or partnerships benefit you in the now, while also setting you up for the benefits in the future? I think that gets lost in a lot of those thought processes. We definitely try to push that agenda. We obviously make sure that that's clear in the conversations. We also let them know what the near-term benefits are as well as the improvements they can make in their overall processes for when the cookies actually do fully go away.
NN: I want to also ask about just knowing that you all have a lot of solutions and we're not going to cover in detail on all of them, but I'm sure that plenty of advertisers are curious about what that suite looks like. How do you help any advertiser make sure that they understand at least from a top-level what they may want to get more informed on so that they are taking advantage of the solutions that would be most helpful for the type of work they want to do in the digital advertising world or advertising world at-large?
VV: I think it comes down to generating just that overarching partnership. We don't want to be viewed just as a vendor. We want to be viewed as someone who can come in and understand your business, understand what the challenges are, and then present to you products that fill those gaps.
Yes, we do activation, yes we do measurement, and yes we do collaboration; but we have a data marketplace, we have other measurement solutions we've built in-house. Not everything is a good fit for every client that we work with. So, we want to come in and we want to understand where your pain points are. We want to understand how we can help to fill some of those voids, whether it's through connecting you with a partner of ours or providing a solution of our own. We're happy to do both of those things because we're looking at this as much more of a long-term relationship than we are something that's very transactional—trying to generate those relationships that allow you to feel comfortable with the products we're presenting to you, and then ultimately making sure you're using those products so you see the value, because shelfware is not something that we're looking to provide.
NN: You mentioned data collaboration a couple times now in our conversation. Where are there misconceptions about what data collaboration is? What do you want to clarify about how data collaboration is integral to what you offer and what advertisers should know more about it?
VV: Yeah, data collaboration comes up in all the different workflows that we've talked about. From an activation standpoint there can be collaboration with first and third-party data. There can be collaboration across two marketers. I think the easy example is a retailer and a CPG that want to work together. Collaboration also takes form in measurement, too; so, it's understanding how your media is effective with some of the social partners that may be working with us.
I think the biggest thing that we like to convey is LiveRamp has a collaboration platform and we're happy to work with you within our platform but, like we've talked about previously, if you're already working in Snowflake, we can help to support collaboration and Snowflake-- we can help to support that elsewhere. I think there's just more flexibility to it than brands may give it credit. They may think of it as very much a retail media-focus, but there's a lot of different ways that brands are coming to us looking to collaborate. Whether it's loyalty programs to, you know, let's say an airline with a hotel program or maybe a rideshare program that wants to do things.
There's a lot of different ways that you can look at this, but I think the benefits are the same. You get more access to data, you do it in a privacy-safe way, and it also allows you to do the activation at the end of the day, too, and that's the biggest piece on the LiveRamp side in my opinion. I think allowing you to connect that data to the partners that you can then serve media too is something that is missing from some of the other solutions that are out there.
NN: How do you really inform conversation about the points of separation between authenticated identity versus identity resolution, since they're both mentioned so often in the marketplace?
VV: Identity resolution kind of underpins the whole scenario. Authenticated identity is an example of you go to your favorite news website and you're logging in to gain access to content; that to me is authenticated identity where there's an opt-out that's available for that consumer to be able to remove their data—and we are using that as a piece of the puzzle. But the connectivity that brands are looking for requires the authenticated ID but the identity resolution bolsters that authenticated ID. It makes it so that we're more flexible on what data you can send to us. It makes it so that we can expand where we know that that individual has more than one touchpoint that's out there in the ecosystem. So, these two things are independent, but they also work together to allow us to provide kind of a stronger solution. Especially when it comes to cookieless where we're going to be so reliant on consented data and authenticated data, you want to have the flexibility and the improved match rates wherever possible.
NN: Do you think the industry anticipates that authenticated ID is going to face similar pressures that third-party cookies currently are?
VV: I don't think so. I think that there's a lot of alternative solutions that may be posing as authenticated IDs but aren't really. There's definitely a fingerprinting problem in the industry—and for anybody who's not familiar, it's using passive IDs that are similar to a cookie to understand who the person is without them consenting. Our solution doesn't follow that path. We think that any solution like that is slowly going to be stamped out. Different pieces of that identity is going to be removed, like IP address and user agent; and a lot of the partners out there have already promised to do that. So, I think truly authenticated IDs are in a really good place. I think some of those that sit in a gray area or aren't authenticated are going to have trouble over the coming year or two.
NN: Something you and I have talked about before is: How confusing it can be out there right now where there are solutions that are being suggested to be cookieless solutions, but incidentally they're still using cookies. And one of the most visible ways that that is happening is with fingerprinting. How do you encourage or educate advertisers or anyone that you engage with on trying to better understand and distinguish when a solution is truly cookieless versus when it probably is invested and involved with fingerprinting or something else that is inevitably going to be taken off the table when cookies are finally done away with?
VV: I think we just encourage them to ask a lot of questions. If something doesn't seem to line up or make sense then it's very likely that they're doing something that doesn't fit the change of the consent framework that we're looking to go to. So, asking questions, making sure you have a good understanding of the product suite for that partner. If something sounds too good to be true then it likely is. I think trusting the partner that you work with and knowing that they're transparent with everything that they're doing, they're forthright with how the product is built—a lot of black box solutions out there. I think we tried to be less of a black box solution. We try to give you exactly how we're doing some of these partnerships and how we're generating these IDs. Ultimately you have to feel comfortable from a privacy and security standpoint that you're not going to end up in front of your favorite news outlet at the end of the day. No brand wants to be there, and I think avoiding that at all costs is really important because there's a financial toll. There's a reputation toll that also comes with it, too. So, we are definitely looking to generate products and partnerships that keep brands out of trouble.
NN: You said black box solutions—somebody at Basis uses the term “magic solutions,” and that there is no “magic” and if you don't understand the origins of how a solution is orienting and giving you something cookieless that very much seems it's giving you not just cross-device but cross-site tracking that there's some “magic” (I'm using air quotes in a podcast that that's being applied). Do you ever have that more confrontative conversation of saying ‘that is fingerprinting’?
VV: Yeah. If you have to ask multiple times in a conversation and you still can't get a straight answer, then you're likely looking at something that you're not going to want to partner with. It's definitely challenging because I think there's a lot of buzzwords that come into play and people are looking for options and different privacy teams have different comfort levels about what their partners are doing. So I think the impetus is really on whoever's leading that partnership to ask the right questions, to speak with everybody, to see if the responses are different from all the different parties that you're talking to and to really have faith that what the partner is conveying is actually how they're going about doing things and that they're transparent in the way that they can go about doing that.
If they're willing to connect you, with the publishers, or the platforms, and have them ask those questions directly to that partner and say, “Look, how is LiveRamp doing this?” they can give you transparency. I would definitely encourage that. If you speak to that partner fact channel and they're like “We don't even work with that provider,” obviously there's something a little fishy going on with that.
So yeah, just asking a lot of questions—a lot of “how” questions—I think is helpful, and if it's too good to be true, it likely is.
NN: For an advertiser that is just trying to better themselves when it comes to addressability at a high-level. Maybe we're not getting into the full consultative conversation with a particular client, but they want to inform themselves before reaching out to you on how they should be thinking about working with LiveRamp, how they should be thinking about preparing themselves to take advantage of some of what you can bring to the table – is there any advice that you would give to an advertiser so that they can do a little bit of leg work to see if there's an opportunity for partnership?
VV: Yeah. I think that we put up a ton of good material on our website that gives brands an idea of the type of workflows, the type of benefits clients are seeing for what they're doing today. You could reach out to LiveRamp. We have people that are dedicated to almost every account that's out there that can give you the 101 without you having to really do much. We're happy to educate you on your behalf. We're happy to kind of have those conversations up front and really give you the information that you need. I also think if you're a little bit further down the line, there's a lot of our current clients that are happy to talk with prospect clients and give them a better idea of what they're doing with us today and how that's impacted their business. So, a lot of different ways to go about that, but I would say reach out. We have resources that are willing to have those conversations even if you're not a client to give you an idea of how you could benefit from our products and services—and we're more than happy to do that.
NN: Is there anything happening from an addressability standpoint that you think is particularly exciting that advertisers should be knowledgeable about that's on the horizon or that you're actively releasing or on the precipice of releasing?
VV: Yeah, I’d say there's a few things. CTV is a growing focus. I think across the industry, but especially at LiveRamp. Partnerships with NBCU or Disney or other CTV providers become really important for the brands that we work with. I think direct partnerships with large publishers like the New York Times that we released recently are definitely going to grow in their impact and their usage on the LiveRamp side. Then I think on the measurement side, understanding how the pixels—let's say, on your website—are working today. What workflows are going to be impacted and how can you solve for some of that impact; that's something that we're also really seeing, really focusing on, because we know it plays a really big role in the process for the brands that we work with.
So, things like the conversion APIs, like I mentioned before, is another thing we're really focusing on the addressability side of things because without measurement, activation is always in trouble, so you need to solidify both sides of the equation.
NN: Well, there's no shortage of things to learn about LiveRamp and I feel like I've covered not even 1% of what can be discussed about you all. Obviously, we've got a partnership with you and we're also evangelists for what you all are doing. We appreciate the time and the conversation and looking forward to learning more as you guys keep on chugging all on.
VV: Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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NN: Thanks again to Vince Voiro, Head of Brand and Agency Demand Connectivity & Ecosystem at LiveRamp. There's no question about it: A lot of explorative work and scenario consideration will need to be done by advertisers to find the unique suite of solutions that works best for them. We heard some important thoughts from Vince on how to think more deeply around an established partner that's committed to helping move addressability for the future forward. That's it for this episode of AdTech Unfiltered. I'm Noor Naseer. We'll talk again real soon.