#17: What is LiveRamp's Authenticated Traffic Solutions (ATS)?
Notes from an interview with Luke Fenney at LiveRamp
LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) enables global addressability by connecting publisher and marketer data to better personalise and measure advertising across authenticated inventory. Critically, the Authenticated Traffic Solution helps to mitigate third-party signal loss and enables scale and flexibility for the ecosystem. For those curious about the product and how it works, below are brief notes from a Q&A that I had with Luke Fenney (VP - Connectivity and Ecosystem, Europe and Brazil) at LiveRamp.
Q1: Addressability gets mentioned a lot as an issue that needs to be tackled in the post-cookie world. Can you explain what ‘authenticated addressability’ means?
Luke: Authenticated addressability is a scenario where a publisher has created a value exchange with the user, where the user provides their identity (e.g., emails, phone numbers,) in order to get value from the publisher (e.g., to read a news article). Meta and some of the other social platforms set the precedent for this. As a user, you have no no qualms with providing Meta or Snap with your email address.
The open web has started to learn from the large social platforms. It's very common now for publishers to think about the value exchange, where users might have paywalls or just a requirement to login to derive value. Or it could be by providing email newsletters or email alerts to users. Authenticated identity is really that value exchange where in return for providing your email or phone number, publishers create more personalised experiences and with consent, use the identifier for advertising purposes.
The identifier really needs to be something like an email or phone number which is linked to a real world person, rather than a first-party cookie. You cannot link cookie-based identifiers to offline data, for example. Also, not every publisher will have 100% authenticated users. But even if a publisher only has 10-20% of authenticated users, they're typically the most engaged users and often represent 40-60% of a publisher’s overall inventory. Big publishers have decent volumes of authenticated users. For example, in the UK market, The Independent has 5 million registered users. Guardian and Telegraph are in a similar place. And almost all of CTV requires login.
Q2: Could you briefly explain what the Authenticated Traffic Solution is?
Luke: LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution is a critical part of LiveRamp’s cookieless infrastructure, which includes not just Authenticated Traffic Solution, but also RampID, LiveRamp’s durable, privacy-centric identifier, which enables people-based advertising across any channel - digital display, mobile web, mobile in-app, CTV.
The Authenticated Traffic Solution helps publishers convert their authenticated user data into a RampID. Marketers using LiveRamp’s data collaboration platform, or any of our partner platforms, can leverage our Authenticated Traffic Solution to reach their authenticated customers across the platforms and publishers where they are, and seamlessly activate, personalize, and measure on RampID.
More than 16,000 publisher domains have adopted LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, including more than 70% of the comScore 100 publishers.
Q3: How does LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution work under the hood?
Luke: Most publishers will implement LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution through a simple Javascript deployment on their website. The webpage then hashes and passes the email address to LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution. This hashed email is matched to a RampID and then immediately deleted. None of the publisher identity is stored and instead, just a RampID in the form of an encrypted envelope is passed back to the publisher. This encrypted envelope is then stored in publisher first-party storage and passed through the publisher’s header bidders to the publisher’s permissioned adtech partners. Publishers can enable PG, PMP, and open exchange via LiveRamp’s over 160+ DSP/SSP partners. Further, LiveRamp enables direct deals via the publisher ad server via ATS Direct for premium publishers. Importantly - none of the publisher’s identity is ever used except for that publisher’s inventory and the publisher has full control over which platforms can transact on their inventory.
Simultaneously, we have marketeers using our data collaboration platform. They will use the platform to create audience segments they want to target (e.g., using their first-party data from their CRM systems). These audiences will be converted to RampID and pushed into their SSP or DSP partner. The SSP can package those RampIDs as a Deal ID. The DSP will have a campaign with bids placed on specific RampIDs. So once the DSP decrypts the RampID envelope from the SSP, it will check if it has any demand for those RampIDs and will bid accordingly. Finally, the marketer may also choose to run a direct deal with the publisher and push their audience to ATS Direct, which enables clean room matching of the publisher’s audience to the marketer’s inventory.
LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution is also interoperable with multiple identity solutions. So it can convert an identifier into RampID but also - and only with the publisher’s permission - other ID solutions such as Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 (EUID in Europe), and Yahoo’s Connect ID. Further, publishers may add on an optional Google PAIR module to enable PAIR connectivity on the world’s largest DSP - Display & Video 360.
Source: LiveRamp (Page 8)
Q4: What are other alternatives available to the publisher to provide targeting options to advertisers, outside of ‘authenticated audiences’?
Luke: The reality is there's no silver bullet to solve for the end of cookie-based identifiers. I'm never going to tell a publisher that LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution will solve all of their problems. But it's a solution that will help them maximise addressability.
Publishers should be determining the mix of solutions that will help them achieve the scale, and the performance, that they need. Authenticated identity is the gold standard. But they need to supplement that with first-party data segments, which could be behaviour-based personas, contextual solutions, testing solutions coming out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, and so on.
Publishers should pick solutions that are complementary, and work together to help them enable the scale that they previously saw from third-party cookies. But most importantly, as regulatory scrutiny intensifies, publishers must pick solutions that will stand the test of time, enabling them to build and plan beyond the foreseeable future, and also enable their advertisers to run campaigns at the scale and with the flexibility that they need.
Q5: Marketeers at many retail companies and D2C businesses already work with Meta, passing audience data for targeting and measurement through ConversionAPI (CAPI). Is there any added advantage for them to incorporate LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution on their e-comm website to target their audiences on Meta?
Luke: Typically, Meta’s ConversionAPI requires marketers to leverage hashed emails. By using LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, you can instead leverage RampIDs. This both boosts the match rate and enables the more secure transmission of data. Instead of relying solely on hashed emails, which lack built-in rigorous technical protection, RampIDs help to preserve consumers’ privacy, due in part to partner encoding that helps to ensure the security and privacy of partners - and most importantly, of your customers.
Q6: What does a publisher need to do to incorporate LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution?
Luke: There’s no fee for publishers to implement LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, just an agreement they need to sign. Then implementing the Authenticated Traffic Solution is straightforward. You can incorporate the JavaScript code on your webpage, or we have an API that you could call. We have some other solutions as well when publishers just cannot send hashed email outside their environment - in these solutions, we generate the RampID within their own environment.
We have a team dedicated to helping publishers implement the Authenticated Traffic Solution and supporting their journey to cookieless. We’ll help publishers to implement, test, and benchmark today, which is critical to better understand what to expect before Chrome fully deprecates third-party cookies in late 2024.