Intro to Influent Curate!

We are being approached by many publishers reliant on open marketplace revenue, who are concerned about the cookie changes negatively impacting their business. As reported recently, Google has once again announced that it will be delaying the sunset of third-party cookies for Chrome until 2025. Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers alike, have been preparing for the end of third-party cookies in Chrome with a focus on developing alternative identity strategies. Influent Media are well placed to know that from a buy-side perspective, agencies and advertisers are still buying and testing against cookieless solutions, and we have been tasked by our agency partners to bring together high quality inventory under a unified ID solution. Named Influent Curate, we have been working on this solution for the past 12 months. In partnership with and powered by Anonymised, the market leading cookieless data platform.

Under Influent Curate, we are able drive new revenue streams, whilst delivering against the agency desire to work with a privacy compliant, cookieless solution.  Our established sales team in the UK, IE & NL are generating new demand, setting us apart from our competitors who do not have a sales team or trading deals in place across the agency landscape.

Our business priority is still maximising revenues from all demand sources, but we believe this is a crucial addition to our offering in 2024.  Further products are being launched alongside Curate, to integrate carbon reduction & unique, highly viewable ad placements for all our publishers.

FURTHER READING:

In general, and with changes to third party cookie in mind, revenue is expected to move away from open marketplace with an increased reliance on direct sales/seller defined audiences. Importantly, it involves teams actively speaking to buyers setting up deals not making inventory available in exchanges as it will no longer be addressable.

Premium publishers have direct relationships with their users, built on trust and first-party data. This enables them to share unique data points about their audiences – through the first-party data they’ve collected from those users – and provide the insights advertisers seek. As the data source is first-party, publishers see a view of the world that no adtech vendor or platform can. Through collaborating with publishers, advertisers can now access this unique opportunity.

The need to return to more of a direct-sold approach has already been identified by some advertisers, with a growing trend beginning to flourish at the backend of 2022, when publishers saw a 25% drop in OMP revenue and a 37% increase in direct-sold audience revenue, according to industry used DMP’s. Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2023, targeted impressions grew 55%. In fact, direct-sold ads will represent 75% of the total programmatic digital display ad market by 2024, with OMP only accounting for 8.5%.

We pride ourselves in being able to navigate this space effectively and expertly for our Publishers through INFLUENT CURATE.

We are now being approached by publishers, outside of our portfolio, who are reliant on open market place and understand the benefits of joining a larger portfolio. Agencies want to be able to reach premium audiences at scale and will be limited to do this with one on one publisher relationships. As a reaction Influent have created our own curated marketplace, which allows us to leverage the collective audience across Influent (Rightmove, Trainline, Ticketmaster, AccuWeather, Marriott Group of Hotels + others) and deliver these audiences without a reliance on third party cookies.

Our audience solution operates independently of cookies and does not utilise any first party data from users. Instead, the tool functions by leveraging data values stored on the user’s device, with segmentation and processing occurring seamlessly during the user’s session. Consequently, this approach ensures that the information is anonymised, safeguarded and maintained with security and privacy for the user. This solution allows us to create curated deals that enable agencies and buyers to reach desirable audiences at scale. It is important for us that a publisher offering stays relevant to buyers so this tool will allow us to keep publisher segments addressable which have potential to lead to higher revenues and no effect to OMP revenue drop.

In its initial stages, Influent Curate will be rolled out across our core portfolio as that is where we see the real benefit and audience relevancies, not to mention a closed and safe environment for our partner brands to operate in.

Further benefits:

• More effective tool than the readily available DMP setup at a fraction of the cost
• Ability to categorise as per industry/IAB
• Another revenue avenue via Influent/Anonymised segments
• Enrich audience data
• Part of an ecosystem of data with market leading relevant brands that have a higher rate of interest in verticals than that of a “news site” i.e. ticketing, property, weather, hospitality

Benefits to buyers:

• Supply management: Influent Media will provide tailored packages that increase our advertiser partners operational efficiency.
• Data curation: Access to premium and trusted data partners to reach the right audience without wasting their advertising budget.
• Commercial incentive:  Depending on volume of spend, they will be eligible for commercial incentives that will help drive profitability and long term onsite partnerships.
• Standardisation and efficiency:

• Streamlined strategy via Influent Media: By setting strategies directly at the supply level, advertisers will be setting control over the inventory their campaigns purchase. This standardisation simplifies decision-making and reduces the complexity of managing various ad inventories.
• Efficient trading team operations: With the standardisation of curated deals, trading teams are relieved from the burden of targeting a complexity of uncoordinated deals. They can focus on approved, curated deals that align with their brands strategy, leading to more efficient and effective campaign management.
• Centralized inventory control: Advertisers gain the advantage of centrally controlling the inventory. This centralization means that changes to campaign strategies can be implemented more swiftly and cohesively across various platforms and publishers.
• Low barrier to entry
• We will set thresholds, but the view is to encourage testing that becomes regular and more consistent and works its way to a managed service model.

Influent Curate is seen as a new incremental revenue line that will look to encapsulate the way media buying will happen from January 2024 onwards. With the cookie deprecation at the heart of it, agencies and advertisers will be changing the way they buy inventory, not to mention the way they gain access. Influent Media will look to leverage the high-quality audience data across our market leading publisher brands to create quality campaigns at scale (Publisher combined audience segments). We pride ourselves in having in place Publishers within our portfolio that have prioritised the way their first party data is captured. With an abundance of high trigger points, attractive to buyers, we have the capability of providing our advertiser brands with qualified reachability and transparency into their campaign strategies.

In a study by the UK’s ISBA, it was revealed that around 15% of advertiser spend in the programmatic supply chain is unaccounted for. At the same time, publishers receive only around 51% of advertiser spend. While over 60% of publishers are concerned about third-party cookie depreciation, only about 25% have a solution in place. This is where Influent Curate comes in.