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In Digital Advertising, More Of Same AND A Lot More: Q&A With Neustar's Silvers

Steve Silvers, vice president, product management, Neustar IDMP, works in the field of identity resolution. His company is pouncing on the opportunity created by Google’s dissolution of DoubleClick IDs by partnering with the global ad management platform Flashtalking. How that will impact the digital advertising field is his story to tell:

Charlene Weisler: What is Flashtalking?

Steve Silvers: Flashtalking is a global platform for ad management, data activation and insights that help marketers use data to personalize advertising, analyze its effectiveness and optimize performance across channels and formats. It is powered by proprietary cookieless tracking, data unification and algorithmic attribution. 

Weisler: Describe the partnership between Flashtalking and Neustar.

Silvers: In the wake of Google’s recent announcement that it will restrict and ultimately eliminate the use of DoubleClick IDs, marketers were at risk of being left without a way to measure the impact of their marketing. This partnership was established to address that gap. 

Weisler: Why do you think Google retired DoubleClick?

Silvers: Google wants to consolidate and streamline their stack, simplifying their product offering to their clients and prospects. They are pushing the ecosystem to think of Google as an integrated offering -- analytics and ads working together as one. And they are not wrong with this assumption. 

The larger change that Google has made, however, is the elimination of the USERID and PARTNERID fields in their data transfer (log) files. This is data that brands have been leveraging to match users to their third-party platform identities. 

As an alternative, Google will be pushing all clients to their Ads Data Hub product. This will restrict clients to a Google-only identity, creating further fragmentation and detachment from a single and holistic customer view.

Weisler: Describe the void that your partnership fills.

Silvers: The implications of Google’s action are significant, as this change directly impacts data linkage and alignment. Advertisers will now need to decide how much control and transparency they want from their media partnerships and whether to untether from the Google ecosystem entirely, or work with other neutral measurement partners to provide an independent view across their media. 

Our partnership is giving marketers an alternative way to maintain a single unified view of their impression data, enabling analytics and accountability.

Weisler: What does the end of Doubleclick mean for the marketplace?

Silvers: Due to the removal of the DoubleClick ID, advertisers may encounter limitations as they use independent third parties for a number of critical functions, including:

Verification of user-level delivery, reach, and frequency

Analysis of cross-channel and cross-device engagement

Multi-touch attribution outside of Google’s own measurement tools

Measurement and optimization of ad creative, beyond click-through rates or last-touch KPIs

Attributing store visits and offline transactions to online media engagement 

Analysis of user-level data to understand customer interests, behavior, and preferences

This is why Flashtalking and Neustar created an open, integrated alternative to Google’s marketing platform. This provides a foundation for a connected ecosystem based on ad management and identity management for a better integration between the DMP, ID graph, ad serving/cookieless tracking, personalization and data unification. And it is a cross-platform solution.

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