LiveRamp’s alternative to third-party cookies is its Authenticated Traffic Solution, or ATS. “We’ve been investing substantially over the past four years in…ATS, which enables publishers to connect their first-party identities (a user login on the New York Times, for example, or the Washington Post) to our people-based platform,” said Travis Clinger, SVP, addressability and ecosystem. “As we see the end of the third-party cookie looming, and the changes to the IDFA happening this spring, we expect to continue to scale ATS. Already we have about one in five people logging in on the ATS network, and we expect to continue scaling that over the coming months, allowing marketers to continue to connect with their consumers across any channel without the need for a third-party cookie.”

Anonymous traffic, consisting of users who don’t log in to websites, eludes the grasp of ATS. “Exactly,” Clinger agreed, “but a login can be a variety of events. For example, it could be clicking a newsletter link, signing up for text alerts, or using a widget on the site to engage in comments or discussion.”

LiveRamp has also announced a partnership with Media.net, the international contextual advertising business, allowing marketers to leverage contextual and addressable advertising together, rather than in separate siloes. Contextual is not, in itself, the future of the ecosystem, Clinger emphasized. “But we’ve always believed there’s an opportunity to pair contextual with addressability.

Read more here.

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The music video network Vevo is using AI to facilitate more effective targeting by zeroing in on the emotional connection.

The global network this week launched Moods, an AI-powered product that groups videos by emotional category — so far, options are empowered, heartfelt, fun, and impassioned — allowing users to design their listening experience and advertisers to place campaigns in an emotionally congruent environment. The rationale is that aligning ad theme and tone with relevant content will boost consumers’ ad recall and brand favorability.

From a scientific standpoint, the case for Moods is well documented in cognitive science research. When music elicits the emotional responses so familiar to us, a chemical chain reaction takes place that reinforces those musical-emotional connections, which in turn are associated with enhanced memory. In brief: We hear music → we feel an emotion → we’re more likely to remember whatever we’re looking at in the moment. 

From a brand perspective, it’s a no-brainer: Users get the ease and novelty of a mood-based playlist, enhancing Vevo’s brand affinity while advertisers potentially strengthen connections with hyper-targeted messaging.  

Vevo worked with the music data company Musixmatch to identify and tag videos based on various musical features of the songs in its catalog. A proprietary model built by Musixmatch then assigns a mood to each Vevo video’s metadata tag for seamless contextual targeting.

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Drift, the conversational B2B marketing and sales platform has announced it’s going digital first, meaning that staff will work remotely — permanently. Explaining the decision, CEO and cofounder David Cancel began from the premise that the world has changed indefinitely.

This presented three possibilities: insist on going back to the old ways of doing things; go fully remote; or create a hybrid of the two. He rejected the hybrid option as “inequitable” — from experience, he knew that remote workers would feel left out of onsite workplace interactions.

With its popular in-person Hypergrowth events (pre-pandemic) and emphasis on conversation, Drift has always emphasized human connections. If Drift can go digital first, how many martech companies — which should have a head start in terms of virtual infrastructure — will follow? Full disclosure: Third Door Media, publishers of MarTech Today, is a natively remote business. 

Read David Cancel’s reasoning here.

“You get to send one MOPs-related post to alert people you are in trouble. What do you post?  I’ll start — You should score email opens as part of your lead-scoring model.” Jason Raisleger, Sr. Marketing Automation Consultant, Perkuto.