• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Index Exchange, an independent supply-side platform, recently became the first SSP to integrate proprietary data and custom algorithms from Anonymised into its platform.

Anonymised -- a tech firm co-founded by its CEO Mattia Fosci, a lawyer with a focus on privacy -- specializes in incremental targeting and measurement of ID-less audiences. 

The targeting data is drawn not only from bid requests but from publisher, user and inventory data collected from the web.

This integration allows Anonymised’s custom algorithms to run in Index Marketplaces, applying logic at the point of impression before a bid request is sent to a demand-side platform (DSP) and enabling advertisers to complete closed-loop optimization of programmatic campaigns on the supply side. 

Closed-loop optimization is an automated process that allows a system to use feedback from its performance to make continual adjustments.

By adding the ability to make decisions closer to the supply side, it helps media owners derive more value from their inventory and enables marketers to improve campaign performance in ID-less environments.

Moving the decisioning gives the SSP’s technology more intelligence with a better pool of inventory to optimize against, and reduces reliance on external identifiers, supporting incremental reach and more efficient optimization in low-bid environments. 

It’s important because the bid request has limited data, Fosci says, and the DSPs often do not read all the fields of a bid request because it introduces latency.

Anonymised adds a layer of data before that so the historical performance data has already been added before the DSP applies the decision, improving ad quality, he said. “The volume of impressions seen can be very small,” Fosci says. “A typical DSP might see between 1% and 3% of traffic of an SSP, so they are missing out on a lot of traffic.”

“Identifiers are not completely disappearing,” Fosci says. He adds that the company has built a different way to target cohorts and people that can connect user identities on devices and can profile users on Safari as well as iOS and FAST channels, with the data stored locally.

Fosci says the audiences are created in real-time and are applied to advertising deals that are transacted through SSPs and DSPs. Incremental conversions are then measured because the technology can connect the person to the impression.

“We’re not replacing IDs, but rather filling the gap with data,” he says. “About 60% of global impressions do not have much data to identify the connection. This market seems to be ignored. People don’t talk about how DSP logic only works when there is data that can be matched.”

Although Index Exchange is the first SSP to partner with Anonymised and provide this service to its customers, Fosci says, OpenX has a similar product and will become a partner in the future. 

The collaboration reflects a broader industry movement toward applying intelligence on the supply side -- where targeting, optimization and measurement occur within the exchange.

Anonymised has data on nearly 700 million unique users across 350,000 publishers located mostly in North America and Europe, and was developed with the idea that cookies and tracking IDs would disappear.