Research

People-based versus Cookie-based Measurement Comparison

Marketers for many years relied on measuring their audience reach, frequency, and conversions by using the ubiquitous “cookie,” a temporary identifier dropped onto user browsers until they delete them periodically (typically every 30 days or so). This identifier made it possible to track people who saw an ad (reach) and who showed up to the advertiser’s website to do some action (conversions).

However, with the advent of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, the cookie started to crumble as a reliable way to have a complete view of a consumer’s digital ad experience. In fact, with the introduction of mobile in-app experiences and mobile device IDs, the consumer digital identity fragmented further, making it hard to accurately measure and therefore personalize and optimize ads.

Now with people-based marketing, brands are unifying their view of a consumer by connecting multiple cookies and device IDs. Deterministic identity graphs such as Thunder and LiveRamp are able to use authenticated logins across multiple devices to build a complete, accurate picture of who the consumer is across devices. Most of ad tech hasn’t yet been updated for the people-based world and so still run on just cookies or single device IDs for measurement, causing misleading results.

Thunder teamed up with LiveRamp to produce the first open, people-based ad server and as a result of running billion of impressions a month, Thunder has been able to study the difference between the traditional cookie-based measurement and new people-based measurement.

The fact there is a difference isn’t surprising but the size was quite shocking. Using cookies-only have been shown to only ~50% accurate now in the new multi-device world!

Get the full results in our new whitepaper, “Ad Counting Comparison Study.”

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New California Privacy Law Compared to GDPR – Summary

GDPR v. California Privacy Laws

Digital marketers just rushed to meet GDPR compliance in May 2018 for digital marketing in Europe. They now need to rush to meet a new California privacy law put in place that will go in effect in January 2020. Compared to GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (also known as CaCPA or CCPA) balances commercial and consumer interest much more to enable digital marketers to continue data-driven marketing while giving consumers more protections and options.

Similarities:

Both CaCPA and GDPR

  1. apply to businesses that are not located within their borders
  2. assign responsibility for enforcement to a governmental authority
  3. do not permit discrimination against individuals who exercise their legal rights
  4. provide individuals with certain rights with respect to personal data; including the right to access and delete their personal data
  5. address some similar concerns (e.g., the importance of access and transparency)
  6. will require businesses to expend time and money to achieve compliance

Key Distinctions:

  1. GDPR comprehensively addresses many privacy concerns (e.g., disclosures businesses must make to data subjects, process for data breach notification to individuals and regulators, implementation of data security, cross-border data transfers, etc.) while CaCPA is focused on consumer privacy rights and disclosures.
  2. GDPR provides comprehensive private rights of action while CaCPA does not create a private right of action except for data breaches (and with many requirements).
  3. GDPR provides a more comprehensive set of rights to consumers, including the right to data correction and the right to data portability, which CaCPA does not have (unless the business decides to respond to a request for portability by providing the data electronically, in which case it must do so it in a readily useable format that can be transmitted to another entity only to the extent it is technically feasible).
  4. GDPR includes considerably more comprehensive requirements on businesses, including privacy by design and default, foreign company registration requirements, data protection impact assessments, 72-hour breach notification, data protection officer requirement, and restrictions on cross border transfers.
  5. GDPR requires data controllers to sign formal, written agreements with processors that meet stated requirements of a processor’s handling of personal data. CaCPA requires only requires a written agreement with a third party in very limited circumstances.
  6. GDPR requires businesses to assume and contract for appropriate technical and organizational security precautions. CaCPA does not mention security other than to provide a cause of action for lawsuits on behalf of consumers for the unauthorized access, exfiltration, theft, or disclosure of personal information that is not encrypted or redacted that results from the failure to implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices.
  7. The GDPR requires that businesses must have a legal justification before it collects, processes, or transfers personal information, with a consumer’s informed and unambiguous consent as a single means of achieving that legal justification. CaCPA on the other hand does not require businesses to have such legal justification and uses an opt-out approach

Detailed Comparison

If you’re worried about your compliance with both laws, you should read Part II of GDPR vs California Consumer Protection Act that covers in more detail the nuanced differences and why compliance with one law doesn’t ensure compliance with both.

Thunder’s Role

Thunder Experience Cloud enables the advertising ecosystem to balance consumer interests in privacy with commercial interests in data-driven advertising. Thunder helps ad platforms prevent data leakage, consumers gain privacy, and advertisers obtain transparency through its anonymized people-based measurement solution. Ask us how to protect consumer data while supporting data-driven advertising if you’re interested to learn more.

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What CMO’s Say About Ad Experiences

Marc Pritchard famously said “It is time for marketers and tech companies to solve the problem of annoying ads and make the ad experience better for consumers.”

What do his peers think? The CMO Club has partnered with Thunder to publish a “Guide to Solving Bad Ad Experiences,” which includes a survey of over 80 CMOs and an interview with the CMO of Farmers Insurance on the impact of bad ads and how people-based marketing can fix them.

Some key findings include:
  • 74% of CMOs consider brand loyalty as most negatively affected by bad ads
  • 55%+ of CMOs consider frequency and relevancy as the top factors in bad ads
  • 78% of CMOs consider it “inexcusable” to serve ads for products the customer already bought from them
  • 71% of CMOs consider frequency capping important for ad experience but 60% aren’t confident in even their frequency counting!

Click here to download the full research report.

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Research: Programmatic Creative Industry Report

Programmatic advertising enables digital marketers to reach the right audience at the right time more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Advertisers have heavily focused on who they’re delivering the message to and how they’re delivering it, but what about the actual content they’re delivering?

Is the creative falling behind in this programmatic revolution?

Last year, Thunder teamed up with Digiday Content Studio to research the creative needs of brands, agencies and publishers. Watch this video to learn the top findings from this report.

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Programmatic Creative Strategies and Tactics Playbooks

playbook

The emergence of programmatic creative platforms has unlocked many ways to tailor, test, and optimize ad creative to drive campaign performance. When we looked into other people’s numbers, we found evidence that customizing creative consistently delivers a 30-50% boost in performance. That’s a little under our experience, where our customers that optimize creatives tend to size up to benchmarks by 2X or more.

It’s clear that in the age of so much data in digital media, the model of showing one generalized creative to everyone is giving way to a new style of advertising that combines data and creative in ways that resonate far more with audiences and produce greater results for advertisers.

But for companies seeking to leverage many of these new strategies, where does one begin? If you’re looking for examples of these ads, how can you find them?

The newest installments to our programmatic creative series of eBooks dig into precisely these questions and the strategies and tactics that new technologies like Creative Management Platforms and dynamic creative optimization make possible.

We’re calling them programmatic creative playbooks. These guides contain example ways to tailor creatives to audiences, including example ads. They are meant to serve as inspiration for the next generation of creative strategy.

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Activating $6 Billion in Wasted Programmatic Data

Cost of wasted DSP and DMP investments without programmatic creative

Having already overtaken the majority of digital ad spend, programmatic buying continues its rapid rise.

In the US, programmatic already accounts for over two-thirds of all display media. Magna Global forecasts programmatic-driven ad spend in 2015 to hit $20.5 Bn worldwide. Growth for years ahead is projected to remain steady.

To deliver the right message to the right audience, advertisers and agencies have put about 30% of their programmatic spend, $6 Bn, into targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs.

And yet despite spending billions, the promise of delivering the right message still hasn’t been realized.

Research by AppNexus shows that 97% of programmatic campaigns lack a targeted creative for each audience segment. That means the vast majority of programmatic campaigns use generalized or generic creatives, a factor that has lead to heavy concerns from marketers about driving ROI from big data.

It’s not all wasted data, however. Many companies have figured out how to make creative work in the programmatic era, and they are reaping the rewards:

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Can Optimized Ad Creative Make Programmatic Perform 30-50% Better? These 5 Studies Say ‘Yes’

Performance lift from Thunder ad creative

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about the burgeoning relationship between programmatic media and ad creative. Most of the discourse has been about how optimal creative can significantly impact the performance of the media in theory. The purpose of this article is to look at the data behind what those gains might be in practice.

Creative optimization is the act of customizing and testing advertisement artwork and messaging to be more resonant with audiences. Since programmatic allows advertisers to precisely target specific audiences, these technologies have inspired advertisers to leverage creative variations for greater media effectiveness.

The dominant tactics include:

  1. Customizing ad creative to what matters to specific audience groups
  2. A/B testing messaging
  3. Sequencing or updating messaging over time

The expectation of gains from these tactics comes from an already established success in creative relevancy and testing in email, social, search and website content. Armed with programmatic buying, big data and algorithmic optimization, advertisers hope to translate similar gains into display ads, native ads and video.

The strategies here seem sound, but what data is there to back it up?

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