• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, October 1, 2010

All year I have been hearing advertisers, ad networks and data providers urge publishers to get into the data game. As demand-side platforms challenge the traditional models of selling against context, the creators of that content are being told to pay closer attention to audience and leverage the user-centric data that is becoming the coin of the realm. After all, publishers may as well take control of the data their sites and audience produce -- because in many instances the data providers and ad networks with whom they partner already are.

Many site owners are themselves surprised by the number of tags planted at their own site by the data and network partners, let alone the many who piggy-back on those tags or now insert tracking pixels in the ad they run.  

Suddenly the issue of "data leakage" has come to the fore, and new products are emerging to help publishers monitor and manage the many tracking tags that collect and share their audience's behaviors. Last week PubMatic launched a product aimed at plugging these "leaks," and last month a Chicago-based company called BrightTag also entered the market. Expect more solution to pour in both independent of and attached to the exchanges and optimizers already associated with publishers. 

Whether many publishers are even ready for the data conversation with the new ecosystem of ad technology is an open question. "I don't think many of them know how to talk about it," says Marc Kiven, founder of BrightTag. He sees some companies starting to hire staff to focus on tracking and managing their own user data, but many also are wondering how not to get burned again. Some early providers of solutions designed to give publishers visibility of their own data ended up become networks or audience aggregators themselves, he argues. "They are fearful of using these new sources coming to market because they are afraid of being burned and losing control."

Before publishers can start testing new data partners and making the right deals, they first need to understand what their data sets are and who is already using them. BrightTag promises to normalize and standardize the data sets so they can see them in a single dashboard environment.

Basically, BrightTag creates a super-tag that goes on every page of the Web site. It then manages and redirects calls to the partner tags. This process helps the publisher monitor and filter what data is let through to which partners.  On a functional basis, this approach can reduce latency, Kiven says, but it also gives the publisher better visibility into who really is harvesting data from their traffic.

"Piggy-backing is a huge problem," he says. Often a page optimizer or traffic-building partner will piggy-back onto their page tag even more for other networks. More recently, the ad impression itself has become a conduit for user tracking the publisher may not even detect. Once used most often by ad effectiveness surveys to identify good prospects for research, the technique has broadened considerably, he argues. "The ad nets found it as a way to piggy-back other ad networks onto a site through these campaigns to resell inventory through real-time bidding. You now have a tremendous number of parties shoved into the creative via the ad networks or someone managing campaigns as a way to target users and build audience. That definitely is an area of leakage for site owners and it is a critical concern for the industry."

Kiven says that publishers have already approached him about the possibility of creating a mechanism that would block ads from dropping cookies altogether. The capability is not in the BrightTag product now, but it may be considered because publishers feel this has gotten out of hand. "Right now it is something they can't control, short of shutting down the ad networks." 

While the trade press often depicts the tension as publishers vs. ad networks, the nets themselves see the benefit in greater transparency throughout the system. "A lot of ad network have reached out to me and say they want to be part of our system and that their clients are asking for tag management solutions and ways of streamlining and cleaning up various tags," says Kiven. "The smart ones are going to play a role in this, while the others that feel they absolutely have to have placement on the site and access to that real estate are going to struggle."  

Of course Kiven is going to have some direct competition from other providers, like exchanges that might offer publishers their own tag management solution as a value-add or just as part of their ongoing relationship. BrightTag will position itself as an independent third party. "We don't take any interest in the data," he says. "We don't own the data. It is your data. We are a utility for you." 

How do sites do the math and figure out what a tag management service is worth? Kiven admits that the ROI is still hard to calculate because the value of data itself is being determined. Analysts have been tossing around vague numbers about the lost value in data leakage, but who knows? He argues that a container and manager of the rest of your tags allow for quicker implementation and testing of new solutions. Tags can be added and limited via the dashboard rather than plopped onto every page. For publishers, "I can say, what is your cost of acquisition to develop content and drive users to it? $10 a user, $20 a user? How much are you losing on the back end if someone can go and buy that audience elsewhere, and at what cost?"

The complexity that the ad technology economy has introduced just in the last few years has now bred another layer (and another cost) that is needed to simplify the complexity by -- in a sense -- adding to it.