Dive Brief:
- Acxiom company LiveRamp released IdentityLink for publishers, new product that helps them monetize their audience by supporting brands’ people-based marketing efforts, per a press release made available to Marketing Dive. IdentityLink for publishers works by resolving publishers' audiences to a privacy-compliant consumer identifier, thereby delivering an omnichannel view of consumers that can be leveraged in online and offline campaigns.
- Hearst, Time Inc. and The Weather Company are among the publishers already using the new product. Time Inc. is enhancing its “differentiated storytelling capabilities" via insights gleaned from a graph of user interests, said Judith Hammerman, SVP data and programmatic at the publisher in the press release.
- IdentityLink for publishers is tied to LiveRamp's 2016 acquisitions of Arbor and Circulate for $140 million. The deal brought mobile-first capabilities and experience in identity resolution, helping LiveRamp accelerate its ability to extend its identity resolution platform into this key area.
Dive Insight:
People-based marketing is an approach championed by Google and Facebook. The basic idea is that marketers can use a persistent identifier across channels — something that wasn't typically possible in the past — to target individuals instead of using cookies to target devices. The strategy has quickly gained appeal because of the potential to reach individuals at the best time and channel for a specific message.
LiveRamp is positioning IdentityLink for publishers as a way for brands to expand their people-based marketing efforts beyond Google and Facebook by partnering with publishers. For publishers, IdentityLink offers them a way to drive their monetization efforts around their audiences, which can offer rich insights but are often small in scale. People-based marketing could make these audiences more attractive to brands to buy ads against by offering omnichannel and contextual capabilities while driving efficiency.
Publishers are clearly looking for ways to better compete in digital marketing. Last week news media organizations banded together to form the News Media Alliance looking for special dispensation from Congress in the form of a limited antitrust exemption in order to negotiate directly with Google and Facebook on more even business terms given both of those platforms’ outsized influence over digital advertising.
Publishers have been squeezed in many ways with digital advertising. They are the hardest hit by the widespread adoption of ad block technology because any ad they can’t serve means it’s an ad they don’t get paid for. And the issue around the power wielded by Google and Facebook is very real with many online media outlets becoming more dependent on outside platform like Facebook just to get their content distributed.