• by Ray Schultz , May 3, 2019

LiveIntent, the provider of a email platform for publishers and brands, has selected Narrative, a specialist in data management, to support its new onboarding and identity service.

The arrangement will help LiveIntent “accelerate go-to-market,” says LiveIntent’s Brian Silver, president of Identity.

The onboarding service, which relies on aligning hashed emails and first-party cookies, is designed to help publishers and brands use their first-party data and compete with walled gardens while complying with CAN-SPAM and other laws.

The service can also help email marketers with their targeting.

“Once you onboard your data, you now have a larger addressable audience and the ability to send effective email campaigns becomes that much greater,” Silver says. 

The decade-old company started out placing ads within email newsletters and marketing emails. It now serves  over 2,500 publishers, reaching 250 million verified people per month, it says.

In April, it launched its onboarding service, based on the company’s extensive experience with email, which will feature an identity graph -- the “culmination of identifiers alongside attributes along with the email address turned into hash,” Silver says. 

The company says it is helping publishers and advertisers prepare for the restriction of third-party ad targeting by Apple (ITP 2.0) and possibly Google.

LiveIntent itself is getting ready for the day when cookies are no longer in use.

Silver says that when brands work with walled gardens, they give up control of their audiences and receive aggregated insights, whereas LiveIntent passes the live data back to them. 

Silver emphasizes that the onboarding service does not use the data from the email platform unless the client authorizes it. 

Narrative was launched in 2016 and offers an automated platform for the buying, selling, use and management of data.

The firm has raised $5.5 million in funding, and works with martech platforms and DTC brands, fast food and gaming.

Headquartered in New York, LiveIntent also has offices in Copenhagen, for engineering, and Berlin, which serves as its product arm. The venture-backed firm has 200 employees. It has raised a total of $65 million.