🔊 IAB proposes new standard that Google plans to ignore

IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc, initiated a year ago, today bore fruit with the release of a portfolio of proposed standards. The IAB is calling for comments and feedback.

The standards. The specifications and best practices comprise two platforms and two addressability-related releases.

Google’s intervention. The Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens was an anticipated element of the standards Project Rearc set out to create. The tokens are at the heart of the solutions being offered by a range of adtech and data players, including The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, Infutor and Neustar.

What seemed to be an uncontroversial move to introduce best practices for those tokens has been disrupted by Google’s announcement that, with the deprecation of third-party cookies, it will also renounce any kind of tracking — even tracking based on first-party data voluntarily offered up by the user. Google has said it will not build or use alternate identifiers to track users across the web.

Why we care. However belatedly, advertisers, publishers and tech vendors seemed to be doing the right thing by coming together to develop an ecosystem which respected consumer privacy. Google has disrupted the effort by rejecting the kinds of first-party-based identifiers that offered an alternative to third-party cookies. But right now, there are questions to be answered about how secure FLoC will be. This story is far from over.

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Ad and shopping experience platform StitcherAds launched Digital Circulars and Catalogs this month. StitcherAds specializes in driving sales for retail partners through social channels like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. The new solution lets retailers surface personalized products and deals to customers on these social media platforms. The ad units also have the capability to connect shoppers to the nearest store to take advantage of the special offers.

What do coupons look like on social? Here are some of the components that StitcherAds covers:

Why we care. For retail marketers, the ability to measure and manage the ad budget is the biggest advantage of these digital coupons. This solution localizes social media ads, and how better to do that than by emulating coupons? For chains with robust mobile app-based loyalty programs, this will engage customers who haven’t cleared the high bar it requires to download your app.

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A new solution in the streaming space lowers barriers for publishers to break out in ad-free streaming. Were this to take off, TV watchers might have the ability to choose from many linear-style channels produced by their preferred news sources. Just picture your favorite websites or magazines as stations, à la Vice.

DistroScale, a video platform for publishers, has launched its DistroTV solution, which takes video content created by publishers, stitches it and distributes it as an ad-supported station.

Co-founder and CEO of DistroScale Navdeep Saini told us, “The big change here is no upfront costs, which I think is revolutionary. Typically publishers have to pay several thousand dollars a month or more to syndicate the channel at each endpoint, and pay fees for dynamic ad insertion.”

Instead, the company takes a cut of the ad revenue on the back end.

Viewer types. Saini said he sees video consumption as split into two main categories. On the one hand, viewers go into “lean in mode” to search out specific content in a focused way for favorite TV shows or specific news stories. Then, there is “lean back mode,” where viewers just want to relax and watch a favorite category of content, like sports or news.

Saini said he thinks there’s a limit to how many subscription services viewers are willing to pay for. This opens a lane for free ad-supported television (“FAST”). Since its launch in 2019, DistroTV has grown to more than 150 live streaming channels.

Why we care. Marketers need to meet their audience where they are, and TV remains an important source of entertainment and news. For subscription services, fragmentation poses a problem because viewers have to make multiple payments to see everything they like. Free ad-supported stations are likely to support more fragmentation because they offer real variety at no additional cost to viewers. Having a solution that lowers barriers for traditional and legacy print publishers to serve 24/7 linear stations will feed this demand as the streaming industry matures.

“A friend told me there are two ways to approach your data. You can gather all your data together and ask it a question. Or you can approach it like a data scientist and torture it until the data comes up with the question.” Theresa Kushner, Practice Lead for Data as an Asset, NTT DATA.