Protecting and enhancing your first-party data as a publisher

Published: 15 Nov 2021

Data is one of your most valuable assets as a publisher. Obviously, you need to have quality content and a great user experience and the myriad of other ingredients that are needed in successful digital publishing. But without a solid of approach to data, your ability to target and monetise your content is significantly hampered. And with third-party cookies on their way out the door, the wealth of first-party data at your fingertips is about to become significantly more valuable still as advertisers look to connect with their audience in a quality publishing environment.

However, in the past few years, imperfect id solutions such as third-party cookies have resulted in publisher data leakage into the ad tech ecosystem. How can publishers protect their data from leaking while also ensuring that their monetisation partners can still activate that data outside of their domain?

At the start of the AOP Publishing Tech Talk, Joanna Burton, CSO for ID5, hosted a Chatham House breakfast briefing for some of the UK’s most prominent publishers to explore best practice and solutions to help media owners safeguard and enhance their data. Publishers spoke openly at the event about their struggle with data leakage, something that they have been trying to address while balancing revenue expectations. Across the group, there were a mixture of representatives who had conducted audits using solutions to help them identify where their data is leaking and which partners are responsible for it, while others were still in the process of setting up these audits. While it’s always a challenge to boil 90 minutes of conversation down into something digestible, here are a few of the key takeaways to help you as you tackle data leakage in your own organisation…

• Data leakage typically occurs when a brand, agency or ad tech company collects data about a website's audience and uses it without publisher’s permission. The core concern is that data leakage will cause a publisher’s ad inventory to depreciate in value.
• Data leakage can happen where a third party gets access to publishers' pages either via cookie syncing or a tracking pixel. The problem arises when platforms that publishers have chosen to work with give other platforms that have no direct relationship with the publisher access to the page to cookie their users. This platform is then able to build profiles of users that they can target elsewhere
• Another way data leakage can occur is when platforms like DSPs are able to access the information that is transmitted in an open RTB bid request between SSPs and DSPs and use it to build user segments that can then be targeted elsewhere
• Often publishers’ SSPs are not aware of causing data leakage via the integrations they have in place so addressing the issue will them encourages the SSPs to take action and fix the issue
• ID5's solution can protect publishers from data leakage as it ensures that publishers contractual obligations are enforced. ID5 leverages the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework to capture consent signals and will use this to ensure the ID is only made available to platforms that the user has consented to. The ID is also encrypted and ensures that only platforms that have been authorised by the publisher and by the consumer are able to decrypt the ID

You can find the full week’s content from the AOP Publishing Tech Talk here.