Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

Specifically, Publicis Media is adding a new set of 30 to 40 questions to an already lengthy request-for-information process that features around 1,200 questions the agency subjects suppliers to on an annual basis, taking about two months to complete per vendor. Adding new parameters to the process — which the agency has dubbed Verified — is meant to help clients evaluate potential tech and data vendors by getting them to supply more information on topics including audience modeling and methodology and taxonomy. The process also aims to convince tech firms to provide access to the algorithmic systems used to make decisions such as audience targeting and inventory pricing. 

While responses to the added questions might not reveal precisely what’s happening inside often opaque ad tech systems, the new inquiries reflect issues that haven’t necessarily been addressed formulaically before.

The latest slate of questions includes, “Do you model your ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, gender, and religious segments?” and follows up by asking providers for “a detailed explanation of the process for each group.” Another question asks, “What guidelines or checks and balances do you have in place to ensure the data for ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, gender, and religious segments are accurate?” Responses might allow the agency to compare the level of detail tech suppliers provide or the amount of attention they have paid to impacts of their tech on multicultural equity.

“Currently, there is no marketplace standard in terms of ethically evaluating data and algorithms,” said Publicis Media’s Shelley Pinsonneault, who oversees the agency’s global technology team that conducts the Verified audits. The ten-year-old data and tech assessment process is intended to help clients figure out what approaches are the right fit, rather than rating or labeling tech suppliers as doing something right or wrong. “Each brand has a different threshold for how they approach data and use information to make decisions,” she said.

Every year, Publicis Media staggers its evaluations by category, and thus far has only incorporated new questions and criteria addressing multicultural concerns and impact when inspecting data firms last year. Now, it plans to add the questions to evaluations for tech providers in a dozen other areas such as DSPs or digital out-of-home ad tech.

Digging into how DSPs value minority ad inventory

Publicis Media’s aim is to get answers about how ad systems are designed in order to understand whether their data flows or automated rules and decision processes could affect people in certain cultural groups in a negative way or lead to discrimination against media that speaks to niche groups, explained Jennifer Garcia, svp of multicultural data science and research lead at Cultural Quotient, the agency’s multicultural practice group.

For instance, to assess how algorithmic ad systems make decisions that can affect whether ads appear in media reflecting a diversity of groups and cultures, Garcia and her team might look at how DSPs decide whether to bid on a publisher’s inventory, at what price, and how and where ad impressions show up on web pages or in apps, in order to gauge how the ad systems prioritize — or deemphasize — publishers of certain types of content.

“Depending on what kind of relationship exists among certain publishers and the DSP, this may or may not play into the bias of what a DSP renders preferential among publishers. And certain minority groups and endemic publishers may be at a disadvantage, which also plays a role in the vicious cycle of not having enough data or insights to help inform future multicultural campaigns for clients who are genuinely vested in the segment,” said Garcia.

Publicis Media also aims to ensure that audience segmentation does not reinforce stereotypes or lump all people in certain groups into a monolithic category, said Garcia. So, her team looks for details on how audiences are built. For instance, when examining a segment reaching 18-34 year-old African-American males, she said, “There is more than just the hip-hop listener and sneaker wearer. There are things such as photography and art, entrepreneurship, interest in any level of academics, food, family, health — there is so much more. When we do not bring these opportunities to the forefront, we miss an extremely important opportunity to effectively reach an audience, with not only purchasing power but influence on society,” Garcia added.

Getting details on algorithms isn’t easy

Publicis Media may wield millions of advertiser dollars, but it still has a difficult time getting access to all the details it might like to have about how data is sourced or how technologies are built, according to Pinsonneault. “The extent to which [tech firms] will open the hood and talk about their algorithms is hard,” she said.

Nonetheless, the agency is pressing the tech firms for insights addressing the ethical considerations underlying their algorithms. For example, one new inquiry in the evaluation questionnaire asks tech providers, “What is your approach to ensuring algorithmic [or] AI bias does not exist within your audiences?”

“Of course tech companies would not [let] other companies have access to source code or algorithms. That’s trade secret,” said Tae Wan Kim, associate professor of business ethics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, who researches issues related to AI ethics. “A better approach is to rely on an entrusted third party that verifies algorithms for the society,” he said.

While Publicis Media itself does not work with third-party auditors in its Verified evaluation process, the company plans to add a query in its RFI asking whether partners have engaged with third-party auditors, which could include companies like Neutronian, which assesses data sourcing and data models, and TruthSet, which evaluates demographic audience data accuracy.

Kim pointed to tools that help explain algorithmic models, such as LIME and SHAP, and argued that ultimately, there’s financial incentive for companies to instill trust in their algorithmic systems and data through auditing. Noting the rise in AI ethics roles at firms including Salesforce, he said, “An ethically justified algorithm will be an important asset, too.”

Just ask the organizations pushing cookieless identifiers queuing up to strike deals with publishers. From Prebid’s Universal ID 2.0 to LiveRamp’s IdentityLink the list of cookie-replacing tech is long and getting longer. 

Often, these cookie replacements require some form of authenticated ID (like an email) to make them work, and that’s most likely going to come from publishers. But some publishers, especially the larger ones, have reservations. They wonder why they should give up this data to prop up advertising outside the biggest tech platforms and not be able to extract the appropriate value it creates. When you serve at the leisure of everyone else, you can only get so rich. 

“We’re skeptical of sharing this sort of data with the broader ecosystem because there’s a risk that it ends in a situation where you have ad tech vendors building these huge databases on our audiences that we have no control over so we’re back to square one of publishers just being providers of users and not journalism,” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet. 

And that’s before concerns over whether these solutions are even privacy-compliant are considered. Google brought those doubts into sharp focus recently when it said alternatives identifiers, like Unified ID 2.0, wouldn’t pass muster with either regulators or consumers. 

For those solutions to work they need scale. And the way they plan to get it is by asking anyone who logs into one publisher to also give their consent to being tracked across other publishers that are using the same identifier technology. Put another way: these identifiers are predicated on someone’s personal data being shared between different companies, which some publishers feel is too similar to how cookies were used. 

Just ask The New York Times, which thinks tracking people this way sounds sketchy and so isn’t on board. Or there’s Ekstra Bladet. The Danish publisher has no immediate plans for those identifiers. Even Ozone, a U.K.-based alliance that includes publishers ranging from The Guardian to Stylist Group, isn’t sure they’re viable solutions long-term. 

As varied as these privacy concerns are, they often boil down to three tension points. 

First, there’s the fact that people might not want to be tracked by companies they’ve never heard of. And even if they did agree, there’s the risk that the more companies who access their data the less secure the whole process becomes. Finally, there’s the political fallout: publishers risk the ire of privacy-preaching tech platforms or beady-eyed regulators given they’re gathering and then allowing personal data to be shared between companies.

“We’re not investing in this process right now,” said Christer Ljones, Schibsted Marketing Services, the Scandinavian media group’s advertising arm. “As it stands, it’s hard for us to see how our users can make informed decisions on a mechanism where them being logged into our ecosystem means they’ve agreed to their email be used as the foundation for profiles to be built across so many different players.”

Ozone Project has similar reservations, but is giving those identifiers the benefit of the doubt — for now.

“Passing identifiers into the bid request — unless it’s directly to the buyer — isn’t a long-term path [for publishers] because it introduces complexity,” said Damon Reeve, CEO of Ozone Project. “Not only is raw data being passed from publisher to someone else without knowing what the price is, but there’s also a compliance issue.”

So why not refuse to work with these solutions outright like The New York Times? 

Few publishers can call on the data gained from 7.5 million subscribers as a replacement to third-party cookies like the Times can. That’s not to say those publishers aren’t trying to match the Times’ subscription success, but they can’t afford for that to come at the expense of ad dollars. So they’re having to consider all available options, including the contentious ones. 

“The advertising world will be a lot more fragmented and brands will have to create more partnerships directly with publishers,” said Tasso Argyros, CEO of customer data platform ActionIQ. “But they will also want to make sure they get a return on their investment and will not be able to afford the effort of working with many independent publishers using a “proprietary” approach.”

In other words, publishers are resigned to there being no single approach to identity in the absence of third-party cookies. Instead, they will have to balance three or four different solutions, whether it’s their own data, probabilistic solutions that build on that data to allow for cross-site targeting and measurement or contextual technologies that use content and other device signals to cluster and group similar devices together based on interests.

“We are integrated with the likes of LiveRamp and ID5 and have been for many months because it’s our job to make sure that we have the platform that can transact the way advertisers want to buy from us,” said Nick Flood, global commercial operations director at Future PLC. “I don’t think ID vendors are finished — far from it.”

No publisher will want to be left out if an alternative to the third-party cookie catches on quickly (or unexpectedly) so many must at least test the waters. The problem is they want to see what identifier gets the most traction with advertisers, but advertisers will only use the identifiers that have reached critical mass amongst publishers. It’s a perennial chicken-and-egg scenario.

“It reminds me of a game of musical chairs — no one wants to be the publisher who doesn’t get a seat at whatever table the others suddenly decide to sit at,”  said Cory Munchbach, svp of strategy at customer data platform BlueConic. 

Ultimately, what publishers want is control — a watertight way to share their data with advertisers without it inadvertently spilling over into the rest of the ad ecosystem. Whether they get what they want isn’t so clear-cut. Sure, it’s possible. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be publishers sharing audience-segment IDs instead of individual user IDs with advertisers — it’s just riddled with kinks. 

This way, most notably, doesn’t really let advertisers do all the things they need to do without the third-party cookie. Yes, they can target people with the same degree of sharpness, but they can’t do cross-site frequency capping or measurement because, taken in isolation, there is no user-level identifier for advertisers to work with. 

“Frequency capping could be controlled by the publisher using their own first-party IDs or deal IDs, but that only solves for frequency capping at a site level, not across sites,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of ad tech consultancy AdProfs. 

Plus, all of this only works for scaled publishers. 

“For subscale publishers, most of this falls apart,” said Vidakovic. 

But for cross-site frequency management and measurement to work, there needs to be a common linkable identifier, which means an identity solution of some kind needs to be involved, he added. Or perhaps the web browser handles all these use cases through native advertising APIs in the future, said Vidakovic, like what’s being considered in Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals — though how those will work with the OpenRTB ecosystem is a bit fuzzy right now.

Still, the way publishers see it, it’s probably better to try and make a go of cashing in on their data themselves before they step aside and let the rest of the industry try, especially when there are solutions out there to help facilitate this alternative approach.