Ad Tech has an Onboarding Problem

Cookies have been Over-Harvested, and Ad Tech Needs to Replace Them

Programmatic advertising is driven by audience reach and accuracy.  There is much discussion in the industry about “person-based” online marketing because advertisers are demanding transparency.

As it stands, offline-to-online onboarding is a one-way process built on a crumbling infrastructure that was never meant to support it. According to Forrester Research, cookie block rates passed 50% back in 2012. Prospect files matched to third-party cookies are seeing smaller output from larger coalitions of users blocking cookies with each passing season.

Cookie-based onboarding works by matching prospects to desktop cookies associated with hashed email addresses. Typically, match rates can range between 20-40%. The matched cookies often contain anonymized duplicates, with some ad networks and DSPs admitting to between 4 and 10 duplicate unique users in any targeting segment. Accuracy is a challenge.

Social accounts and email vendors have opened up their users to person-based matching to plug the gap, but only to support their own business models. Email-to-device onboarding retains duplication and accuracy issues. Users often have multiple emails, and social handles only cover social users. Scale is a challenge.

Semcasting Smart Zones® is a twice-patented data onboarding and IP targeting technology that directly addresses the reach and accuracy issues of cookies. Smart Zones has mapped 140 million physical household and business locations to their Internet delivery points. Over 70 million mobile devices are deterministically linked to their locations and IP Address.

Smart Zones maintains the connection between geographic location and IP range, allowing for greatly increased onboarding match rates and bi-directional data translation. An offline file can be converted online, or vice-versa, at an average rate of 80-90%.  With Smart Zones, any CRM file or marketing list can be turned into an omni-channel asset, actionable in whatever channel best applies — online, mobile, email, social or direct mail.

Semcasting Smart Zones® is a big data solution that has been used in thousands of consumer and B2B campaigns. For more information, download our datasheet.