• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 1, 2024

Omni Hotels & Resorts worked with Google and LiveRamp to drive privacy-focused relevant ads to customers through first-party data.

The U.S. and Canadian hotel chain didn't want to give up personalized interactions with consumers, so it looked to leverage its first-party CRM data through partners.

It collaborated with its digital marketing agency PMG and programmatic media partner MiQ, and relied on signal-less solutions from Google’s Display & Video 360 and LiveRamp to keep close connections with customers.

Partnerships have become important to make cookieless targeting work. Stephen Yap, managing director of Americas media platforms at Google, said “when third-party cookies go away, we need to work together to reinvent and reimagine an entire industry.”

Yap said the future looks more like a technological cooperative in trying to lift the industry and move past the high anxiety of wondering whether there can be a world without third-party cookies.

“We’ve been out there talking about that performance is not at odds with privacy, and I think this is a great example,” Yap said.

Google and LiveRamp initiated the partnership in October 2022 to enable publishers and marketers to connect first-party data in a post-signal market, and found performance, better results, in the Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR) protocol.

The partnership proved it out with Omni Hotels & Resorts as it participated in the first recorded trial to document the partnership, which went live in May 2023.

PAIR supports the targeting through the secure protocol with encryption keys that give companies like Omni Hotels & Resorts the ability to take its data and connect it with publishers to privately and securely target ads to people who have visited its site and publisher sites.

The protocol creates a one-to-one relationship and cannot be reverse-engineered to access the data. It also ties into Google Display & Video 360 for campaign management, and supported by LiveRamp.

Some might call it a positive wakeup call for publishers and advertisers, because the partnership “moves the industry beyond the cookie,” said Travis Clinger, chief connectivity and ecosystem officer at LiveRamp, adding that it puts the consumer first, but actually works for advertisers and publishers.

Initial results working with Google Display & Video 360’s PAIR and LiveRamp showed an increase in conversions, showing a 4x increase in conversion rate in the first campaign compared with traditional cookie-based CRM first-party audience targeting in Display & Video 360.

Conversions were measured as users visited the Omni Hotels & Resorts website after being served an ad.

Change is never easy, but the group expects the conversion rate to rise, with better performance in the post-cookie world compared with previously. LiveRamp is live running tests with Google PAIR across the U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific.