• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 4, 2021

Outreach Strategists, a Houston-based public affairs and communications agency, uses an identity resolution and audience platform with help from Adform and Semcasting that relies on a federated ID rather than a cookie-workaround.

“In the past we would wait for days to get in the first-party data, and then the match rates were not consistent,” said Outreach Strategists’ CEO Mustafa Tameez. “Now we’re seeing an 85% consistent match-rate.”

Tameez said the company began working with Adform and Semcasting just before the election cycle really began ramping up, around July 2020.

The success prompted Adform to name Semcasting AudienceDesigner (ADS) -- a self-service ID resolution, audience design and attribution platform --  as its key partner for first-party data onboarding. Semcasting launched the platform as Activate in October 2020, and recently rebranded it.

The company says the ADS brand name better represents the platforms’ capabilities to design, enhance, filter or suppress data to optimize their audiences with Semcasting’s more than 8600 demographic, behavioral or transactional attributes.

The platform’s cookie-free identity method improves time to market with consistent match rates compared with current benchmarks. With the ADS platform, first-party data is onboarded within minutes, with match rates averaging 85% compared to the benchmark of taking up to five days with an average 40% match.

In October 2020, Outreach Strategists operated in dozens of state-house races, mostly in Texas. The company managed to upload two dozen jurisdictions and match the data to serve the ads within hours. 

Outreach Strategists works with mostly political and healthcare clients. “First-party data used in election-based campaigns that span multiple jurisdictions around the country created challenges, because sometimes it could take days,” he said. “We haven’t seen the same delays."

First-party data ranges from voter files to database of clients or customers. That anonymized data is brought into the data management platform, and other attributes are added.