Permutive and Livingly Media on making the shift to first-party data
At the FIPP D2C Summit, Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager for Permutive, spoke to Jonathan Penn, SVP Revenue for Livingly Media, about how the women’s lifestyle brand was making the shift to first-party data. Penn spoke about creating bespoke packages for brands, harnessing audience quiz data, and the ongoing need for privacy.
Livingly has been a pioneer in the lifestyle space for more than 15 years. Having begun as a direct sales channel, the publisher made the shift a few years ago to allow all of its inventory to be executed automatically. As Penn explains here, that move proved to be both “a gift and a curse”, because while brands were now able to bid using Livingly’s inventory, it also meant that direct partnership deals became less of a priority.
“Since I joined the team back in January last year, our north star focus was to get back to our partnerships by focussing on private deals, providing our clients savings, value and performance. And we have consistently been relentless in overperforming for our clients KPIs and providing them differentiated value especially when it comes to audience targeting into premium content.”
As the shift towards first-party data approaches, Penn warns that brands need to be ready for the coming changes…
“Brands need to immediately identify what alternate cookie-based data solutions are available to compliment that current third-party data usage. And this is most likely through the use of client CRM data, or working with publisher partners to utilise their deterministic data to be part of their media execution.”
“Once the audience targeting has been identified and established, brands should run AB testing in complimentary private deals, that allow the DSP of choice to test, learn, refine and scale accordingly during this important transition period. So far on our side we’ve been encouraged by the results, and not just the savings on the data for the brand, but really the performance of our unique, robust dataset as well.”
Using Permutive, a privacy-safe infrastructure that helps publishers and advertisers to reach audiences while retaining control of their first-party data, the company has developed a winning strategy.
“When we first started working with Permutive over a year ago, we were able to establish two important criteria. Number one, we were going to mimic the taxonomy of data only where we have relevant audiences. And then two was to identify robust audiences that are unique to Livingly media and lean in there. So for example, packages included new moms, or home décor enthusiasts, and health and wellness living that use both contextual and behavioural insights.”
“We started to transact on these complimentary new deals with data, and have been really thrilled with the success for our partners. These partners have not only been able to scale into our inventory across all devices and browsers, in some cases they’ve been able to increase spend by five times where they previously were, and they’ve also been able to save money on that third-party data usage.”
“To us, it’s always about collaboration and solution solving with our partners. Every single day we are working with brands to customise and create bespoke audiences that are CCPA and GDPR complaint, that are aligned with out content reaching these 20 million users monthly.”
Livingly recently launched a new ad package called Iris, which Penn introduces us to here.
“In addition to consuming our content, our users also engage in quizzes that tell them how their personality matches with their decorating style, or what character from the office are they. And millions of these users answer questions and then we know how to match their interests, This is all done at no cost to them, they exchange their time through engaging and entertaining content, all with their guard down and they’re not being incentivised.”
“And so for months during the proof of concept period, we have been working on developing solutions to futureproof identity targeting and provide measurement, and it’s from there that Iris was born. It helps brand to identify segment target and plan new users that originate from their targeted media campaigns across our premium content.”
“With third-party cookies going away, we are starting to see brands beginning to realise that they are going to have to find their customers in the future. And that’s the ability to catch their own users across publisher sites for remarketing and so on. So knowing the importance of this strategy part of the Iris framework is to allow out customers to just do that. And we’ve started using Permutive’s vaults as a way to match out users with our advertisers, and aggregating the data in a way that there are no privacy or leakage concerns whatsoever. From there, we can model specific cohorts to find additional customers and understand deep insights.”
Finally, with the shift towards first-party coming down the track quite quickly now, Kroll asked Penn what his advice for brands would be.
“If I was a brand I would say there were four factors. Number one: use your own first-party data as much as you possibly can, understand who’s active, who’s authenticated, and how do you find these users and manage recency and frequency? Two, try to figure out how you’re going to fill the funnel with robust lookalike modelling, because you might have just a limited amount of reach and finding those new users might be more expensive.”
“Third, understand how you can use your device-managed cohorts in Chrome, based on the changes going on at Google. And then fourth, work with relevant publishers like us. It’s our responsibility to be a conduit – so let us help you discover more of the relevant users for you, and then create opportunities to scale. Similar to what we’re doing right now, we can segment identity and elaborate even further.”
