Over the last year, LiveRamp has stated that one of the next significant changes in addressability (after Google and Apple’s web and mobile announcements) would directly affect Connected TV (CTV) advertising. That change is the restriction or loss of the IP address as a means to identify an individual or household. Apple has already announced that iOS 15 will have a new version of ITP that blocks IP addresses – negating IP targeting on Safari. Earlier this year, Google updated its Privacy Sandbox timeline, indicating that they plan to move forward with Gnatcatcher, a proposal for Internet Protocol (IP) address obfuscation. The change is expected to roll out in about a year.
In this video, LiveRamp’s Travis Clinger SVP, Addressability and Ecosystem and Ian Meyers, Head of Addressability Product explain what’s been announced, how it affects marketers, and the best path forward.
An IP address has a hidden but crucial relationship to most data-driven CTV advertising today.
While many CTV apps and operating systems offer a UUID comparable to Apple’s IDFA, it is less descriptive and not as consistently available to its mobile counterparts. This means that much of the data used for programmatic CTV buys is powered by a probabilistic match that includes an IP address often coupled with either a third-party cookie or email address.
Apple’s preview of iOS 15 ITP and iCloud Private Relay (available as a feature of a paid iCloud subscription, enabled for all trackers flagged by Safari’s ITP) provided a hint of what IP obfuscation could look like. In that implementation, the IP address only provides the user’s approximate geographic location, is volatile, and otherwise anonymous. At this point, we don’t yet know how Google’s Gnatcatcher will be implemented. We do know that it already proposes some features that are distinct from Apple’s system.
These proposals are largely designed to combat fingerprinting, and this is a worthy effort as fingerprinting is inherently not privacy centric. But even if these proposals are limited to the web or an operating system, these changes mean you can say goodbye to using most IP-based CTV graphs to address specific individuals or households on CTV. If this sounds like a potential step backward in where the industry has been wanting to go regarding CTV, you’re not wrong.
How Marketers Should Address IP Blindness
The only path forward for marketers who want addressable, measurable advertising on the web and in mobile environments is a trusted interaction with end-users like that provided by LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS). For more than four years, LiveRamp and its partners have collaborated on a better way for advertisers to connect with and personalise the consumer journey across display (on mobile web and desktop) as well as mobile apps and Connected TV. ATS is truly omnichannel, agile, and built to scale. This means that brands have the means to buy media (on LiveRamp’s people-based identifier) cross-channel and know that they can reach, frequency cap, and measure individuals, not just devices, with consistency and accuracy. The results of our continued collaboration with advertisers and publishers speak for themselves. A recent independent study we commissioned with Forrester Consulting revealed that ATS drives more than 340% return on investment for marketers. For example, in one of LiveRamp’s case studies with a national specialty retail and delivery company, the organisation saw a 20% increase in reach and an 80% increase in ROI, leveraging RampID compared to cookies.
“TV viewers are now well-integrated into streaming environments, which are fragmented across a wide variety of device platforms for advertisers. This makes the marketer’s challenge of reaching and measuring a target audience multi-dimensional, and having a people-based identifier is important to ensuring that advertising campaigns are relevant across channels and devices,” commented Mark Rotblat, Chief Revenue Officer at Tubi. “LiveRamp helps enable authenticated, first-party relationships with our viewers so we can continue to deliver impactful experiences at scale.”
To date, over 400 publishers have signed on or implemented ATS to offer marketers a more efficient way to reach their customers and measure campaign outcomes without third-party cookies or device identifiers. These publishers span all channels – mobile web, digital display, mobile in-app, and CTV.
Ready to learn more or get started with ATS? Reach out to us now!