Last week, AppNexus, LiveRamp and MediaMath (Acxiom) launched a tech consortium to make programmatic advertising targeting people more widely available. The goal of the AppNexus tech consortium is to create a standard framework for demand side ad targeting, that will enable advertisers to access aggregate demographic data contributed by members of the consortium. Other initial members include Index Exchange, LiveIntent, OpenX and the predictive marketing company Rocket Fuel.

Why A Tech Consortium?

According to AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, 48% of all digital advertising dollars go to either Facebook’s ad platform or Google Adwords. This has lead to a duopoly between Google and Facebook, allowing them to easily control what ads are approved/banned and to set price floors per click. This has also caused a strain on the sharing of media, journalism, film and music across the internet. With the aggregate data contributed by the consortium, and a new uniform language and platform to target people through, Facebook and Google may lose their stronghold on the industry.

As nice as it would be to launch a consortium against a duopoly for simple competitive, free-market purposes, this consortium seeks to eliminate the following:

• With Facebook and Google only, there is a lack of a common omnichannel, people-based identifier for targeting.
• There is a major inability to coordinate campaigns across platforms, creating hurdles to economies of scale in advertising.
• There is a lack of inoperability within the mobile web, and
• A siloing of advertising across channels (i.e. you pick where you want to advertise and run all your campaigns through that platform).

The consortium will solve these problems by enabling people-based advertising across devices, formats and platforms to both buyers and sellers of programmatic advertising. This will include mobile, TV, the Internet of Things (IoT), e-mail, and new emerging channels of programmatic advertising (i.e. hotel TVs, Snapchat). Publishers can increase their monetization by increasing the relevance and ability to address their target audiences, in an allegedly “cookieless” environment.

Benefits of the AppNexus Tech Consortium

The goal is to provide a new avenue for demand side advertisers to effectively target people with advertising in a privacy-conscious manner. So what does this mean for the industry? Some of the expected benefits to major stakeholders of this new change:

• Publishers can monetize better by driving high-quality cheaper traffic to their sites, increasing the spread between their CPC on the demand side and CPC on the supply side. Overall, pubs can expect a higher RPM, and increased gross margins.
• Marketers can promote products and services for clients in a more economically efficient manner, increasing sales across the retail and services industries.
• Internet Users across the internet are hit with more engaging, relevant content.

Other broad-sweeping benefits include:

• With the aggregation of data from members of the AppNexus tech consortium, demand side advertisers (i.e. publishers and marketers), can expected improved reach through higher precision targeting.
• This includes being able to link targeting to offline activities such as purchases in stores.

OAREX: A Mountain in a Hurricane

We are anxious to see how this consortium ultimately launches its platform. We’re hoping that it will lead to greater efficiency for pubs and more transparency for advertisers. Greater efficiency for pubs means users get hit with more engaging, relevant content, and transparency for advertisers will increase confidence that their ad dollars are not going to waste.

The industry is rapidly changing, but like a mountain in a hurricane, we stand firm in our mission to bridge the gap between media creators and those who browse the internet. No matter what.

Are you a publisher that needs funding for your digital media campaigns? Find out if you qualify here.