In this issue of the ID5 Partner series, ID5’s Ian Vazquez, Business Development Director,  sat down with Jesse Fisher, Head of Advertising Products at Connatix to ask him about how they are preparing for the changes ahead and explore how they are working with ID5.

What is the series all about? The Q&A with ID5 series invites its publisher, advertiser, and platform partners to share their insights on the big questions and hot topics circulating the digital media industry today. Tune in for new editions featuring thought leaders and experts from across the space.

Tell us about Connatix and its mission. 

Connatix is a video technology company on a mission to power the world’s stories with effortless, empowering, and inspiring solutions. Founded in 2014, Connatix currently works with 350+ publisher groups across thousands of sites and leading brands and agencies. 

Can you tell us more about Connatix’s solutions for publishers?

For publishers looking to help their video business flourish, Connatix offers a unified technology platform to simplify video growth success. Through our proprietary full-stack platform, Connatix empowers publishers to create, deliver, and monetize video while providing advertisers with premium video inventory and precise Deep Contextual™ targeting. 

Within our full-stack platform, publishers can leverage Connatix’s innovative online video platform (OVP), designed to help them effectively reach their audiences through compelling storytelling, high-quality advertising experiences, and tailored content recommendations—all in a cookie-free and privacy-conscious way. In order to produce more on-brand video to drive user engagement, publishers can also leverage our content creation suite so that they can dedicate more time to storytelling with easy-to-use creation tools. 

Since Google’s initial third-party cookie removal announcement we’ve really seen publishers take the lead in preparing for the cookieless future. What steps have Connatix taken? What advice do you have for publishers looking to fortify their strategies? 

Although Google has yet again delayed the third-party cookie depreciation deadline, now is still the time to try out different approaches and adjust accordingly, as data interoperability will be key. Connatix is working directly with both publishers and identity providers to enrich bid requests with alternative identifiers that can be matched on the buy-side for targeting, frequency capping and measurement. These durable identifiers will be vital to future-proof strategies. Changing the industry won’t happen overnight, and can’t happen in a vacuum. Preparing for the end of third-party cookies is an opportunity to set the tone for a privacy-centric future and a data ecosystem built on collaboration, trust, and a test-and-learn mentality. Advertisers and publishers should start testing solutions now, while it’s easy to see the impact through A/B testing using existing measurement methodologies and partnerships. 

What role do you think universal IDs like the ID5 ID will play in combating signal loss in the cookieless future? 

Alternative IDs like ID5 will be critical for scale in a cookieless future, since deterministic / logged-in user IDs will only be available for a small percentage of traffic. This will help publishers and advertisers achieve a more holistic view of reach, frequency, media impact, and interoperability with other alternative IDs or industry solutions to maximize the benefits to all parties.

The industry has begun to shift its attention to video over the past few years, particularly post-pandemic? How can brands take advantage of this emerging channel? What should they keep in mind?

For brand messages to be most effective, they need to reach consumers multiple times, ideally across multiple channels. This is where online video (OLV) and connected TV (CTV) come in. In a 2023 report by Connatix on consumer preferences in video, we found that nearly half of respondents spent up to an hour watching video content each day. By implementing a cross-channel strategy, you can guarantee a brand presence on the TV, phone, tablet, and computer screens of your target audience to capture their attention no matter where they are watching. Another way to meet viewers at the intersection of your brand and their interests is to leverage contextual targeting tools to help maximize reach and scale of campaigns. 

What do you think the digital advertising space will look like in two years after cookie deprecation? What will this look like in terms of addressability and privacy? 

Our industry is ever-changing and it’s hard to predict what will happen next quarter, much less in two years! However, I think that the the industry will settle on a few alternative IDs among the many being tested to avoid fragmentation, and other more privacy-focused solutions like contextual will continue to flourish, evolve, and be refreshed with new signals (e.g., audience, performance) to make them more targeted and outcome-oriented, without requiring the presence of legacy identifiers. Advertisers and publishers will focus on building direct relationships, which will come with benefits such as transparency, negotiated rates, supply path optimization, inventory quality management, and curation (e.g., first-party data sharing, etc.). I’m excited to see how our industry continues to future-proof amidst the ever-changing privacy landscape.

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