Partner Spotlight: LiveIntent
Acceleration Partners’ Partner Spotlight is an ongoing series where members of our Partner Development team shine a light on innovative partners from across the world.
This month, Vikki Danielson, Associate Director of Publisher Development at Acceleration Partners, chatted with Max Corroon, Strategic Sales Director at LiveIntent.
Tell us about LiveIntent and how it got started.
LiveIntent was founded in 2009 as an advertising technology platform with the ability to identify and target audiences in the cookieless environment of email by replacing the cookie with an equally ubiquitous—but far more stable—hashed email address.
Having this non-reversible, encrypted first-party identifier at the core of our technology made it possible for publishers, marketers and technology partners to partake in an immense programmatic ecosystem that doesn’t rely on the walled gardens or third-party cookies.
Now, as an industry built on the third-party cookie rapidly approaches a future where third-party cookies no longer exist, we are transferring this ability to the greater digital advertising ecosystem through our Authenticated Bridge identity framework.
How is LiveIntent different from a traditional affiliate partner?
LiveIntent is one of the largest logged-in (or, people-based) media channels in the US outside of Facebook and Google. With LiveIntent, brands can diversify and scale their native and display advertising efforts into the truly differentiated media channel of email.
LiveIntent operates a unique email ad exchange, enabling reputable publishers such as Hearst, Conde Nast, Wall Street Journal and many more to offer ad inventory within their email newsletters. With our first-party identity graph, we help advertisers reach high-value audiences across ad inventory in newsletters and on the web without relying on third-party cookies.
How does LiveIntent reach such a wide audience?
People don’t consciously realize that, on average, they spend nearly 20 minutes of every hour online in email. Nearly every adult in the US has at least one email address, making email the number one most used application across all devices.
Our proprietary LiveTag enables ad serving in email without using JavaScript or cookies, two fundamental elements of programmatic ads on the web. This allows our over 2000 publishing partners to transform their email newsletters into ad inventory that they can monetize by selling directly to their sponsors or via a real-time programmatic auction where the LiveIntent DSP or our DSP partners bid on available opportunities. That’s why we can show such a large scale in the US.
What types of advertisers do you work best with?
We work with advertisers within just about every vertical, but we’ve found that ecommerce brands that have strong acquisition and retention strategies built on first-party data are the most likely to thrive on our exchange.
These typically include direct-to-consumer retail and service brands, ecommerce marketplaces, and financial service brands, but we’ve found that even sectors like quick-serve restaurants can perform very well on our platform if they have a robust first-party data strategy.
Your level of targeting is very sophisticated, can you tell us more about the different targeting methodologies advertisers can utilize in order to see high decreases in CPA and high increases in ROAS and CTR?
Because of the logged-in nature of the email channel, LiveIntent is able to give brands confidence that their advertising budgets are invested in people-based targeting and attribution solutions that help measure ROAS tied to customers instead of cookies.
Advertisers set their targeting criteria (including onboarding data for custom targeting) and define campaign goals (such as CPA, CPC, etc.), which our algorithm then uses to find the most valuable impression opportunities and deliver relevant ad creative.
In order to maintain efficiency and performance while scaling a campaign, we recommend advertisers leverage their first-party data from their website and customer relationship management to take a full-funnel approach to campaigns.
For example, an advertiser can onboard a segment of their most valued customers to:
- Suppress these customers from being served impressions for an acquisition campaign.
- Model a lookalike audience for finding new people that share demographic and behavioral traits of these customers.
- Target these customers with special discounts, deals or offers as part of their retention or reactivation efforts.
We are also able to support mid-funnel strategies by creating dynamic audiences based on engagement across your website or app. These audiences can be used for basic retargeting efforts as well as serving Dynamic Product Ads, which gives advertisers the ability to tailor an ad to a user based on product views, shopping carts and purchases.
Do advertisers need anything specific to work with LiveIntent?
The process to work with LiveIntent is fairly simple.
Based on an advertiser’s campaign goals, we develop a custom strategy to reach those goals. From there, all the advertiser needs to do is place our LiveConnect tag on-site, send us 2-3 sets of creative assets and corresponding click URLs and provide a hashed file of existing customers if you are looking to reach a net new audience (optional).
If all of that is in place, our dedicated managed services team can get the campaign up and running within 24 hours.
Where do you think partner marketing is heading in the next year and what are the main market disruptions?
2020 has forced brands to re-evaluate and alter how they’re reaching consumers, and there are two trends that we believe will continue into 2021 and beyond:
- The death of the third-party cookie: At the beginning of the year, Google announced they will be eliminating the use of third-party cookies by 2022. With the third-party cookie having been the primary identifier used to help understand consumers’ needs and behaviors up to this point, brands must now formulate a plan over the next year to bridge the gap before cookies are eliminated.
- The overcrowding of performance advertising spaces: With people spending the majority of their time at home these days, brands that were previously reliant on brick and mortar business have had to rapidly shift towards an ecommerce/direct-to-consumer model, which will increase the competition across traditional performance advertising spaces, limiting reach and driving up prices. As a result, brands will need to focus on diversifying and expanding the channels where they buy media in an attempt to not only keep costs down but also look for ways to reach potential new customers.
What is one fun fact about LiveIntent?
The LiveIntent logo is actually the half-silhouette of a little man named “Nelson.” No one is quite sure why he is named Nelson, but he made his first appearance before LiveIntent became what it is today.
