• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 11, 2020

As the industry moves away from third-party cookies and toward firming up a variety of data privacy laws, a partnership between InMobi and LiveRamp IdentityLink becomes more important as the two companies seek to address and improve omnichannel targeting and measurement.

The partnership enables cross-channel targeting by matching user data across platforms and in-app advertising campaigns. The partnership enables cross-channel targeting by securely matching permissioned user data across platforms and in-app advertising campaigns. LiveRamp IdentityLink also helps provide advertisers with a way to target, optimize and measure omnichannel audience campaigns.

At least that's what Travis Clinger, SVP of addressability and ecosystem at LiveRamp, and Prajwal Barthur, head of product, marketplace and connected TV at InMobi, say.

It’s about leveraging first-party data, enabling IdentityLink to connect hundreds of individual identifiers to real people, enabling marketers to target one-to-one messages and measure the return on media investments.

LiveRamp has partnerships with companies across the advertising industry, said Clinger. “While InMobi is the first mobile SSP, there are 16 other SSPs with IdentityLink in the bidstream or implementing IdentityLink in the bidstream.”

These include OpenX, Index Exchange, Rubicon Project, and others. On the demand-side, 34 DSPs are buying or committed to buy on IdentityLink including Beeswax, Beachfront, Amobee, Criteo and MediaMath, to name a few.

Partnerships make this solution work for the industry. For publishers, it means they can connect a variety of inventory -- in-app, display or mobile web -- to IdentityLink.

Marketers can leverage a neutral and interoperable identifier that is portable across platforms. The partnership also makes available better measurement features to measure return-on-advertising spend, regardless of the channel.

Publishers previously were limited in how they could represent their inventory to omni-channel buyers. They were restricted by the identifiers they used, as frequently these IDs were specific only to their platform.

This means advertisers and other demand partners would have to translate those IDs into omnichannel identifiers.

This integration gives publishers, potentially, better fill rates. The same supply becomes valuable for omnichannel buyers.

For example, app publishers mostly see ads served in their app that promote other apps.

A lot of the cookie-driven audience ads go on mobile web and desktop unless the buyers have cross-device targeting enabled.

InMobi’s goal is to make inventory attractive to advertising customers and identifiers available to buyers, said Barthur. There also are multiple consortiums working to address these ongoing challenges and develop new identifier solutions.

InMobi will continue to work with its partners to promote the adoption of privacy-based solutions, Barthur said.