Is personification the future of digital advertising?

Mobile is now unarguably the supernova of advertising, with global spend reaching a giant $288bn in 2021, up 26.6 per cent year on year.^[1] It is also an area in huge flux, owing to the seismic changes wrought by the EU-wide introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the swift uptake of comparable legislations in California and the UK. Since 2018, websites have had to collect explicit consent from users in order to track them via cookies on websites, or advertising IDs within apps.

Unsurprisingly, many people are declining to have their digital lives tracked so thoroughly, when given the choice. “Users came to realise that the business model dependent on advertising revenue, generated by online content, is at the heart of concerns about privacy [and] viral information,” says Robin Mansell, a Professor of New Media and the Internet at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The impact of this new understanding has been dramatic, with the advertising industry as a whole having to adapt to survive.

Not everyone was taken by surprise, however. The mobile advertising technology company Ogury, established in 2014 in London and Paris, was prepared for GDPR right from the start. It was the first to create a Consent Management Platform, which enabled users to accept or reject sharing data about their mobile journey through app usage and web browsing. “Everyone thought we were crazy at the time: why ask for user consent when all you have to do is help yourself?” recalls Thomas Pasquet, Ogury co-founder and CEO. “Then GDPR proved us right, and forced everyone to do what we did.”

Strikingly, nearly half of Ogury’s customers gave permission for their data to be collected and the former start-up – now with 19 offices in 14 countries worldwide – has gathered insightful data on the activities of more than 2bn phones around the world, and used that data to service clients including Microsoft, IBM, Nike and Mondelez. Given this plethora of aggregated data patterns, Ogury realised it did not need to collect any more information to have an extensive understanding of audience interests. The company made the shift in 2020, stopping all data collection and anonymising the insights drawn from several years of data analysis through correspondence tables. It created Personified Advertising, its own proprietary tech that – in direct contrast with personalised advertising – works by leveraging wider audience interest data to qualify impressions rather than using personal data to qualify individual users. To ensure these insights remain up to date, they are consistently validated and enriched with online surveys.

The success of Ogury’s model is independent of advertising IDs and deploys “personification” to deliver both the broad and comprehensive target knowledge required by brands, at the same time as safeguarding customer privacy.

Now another big shift is on the horizon. Apple, three years on from the introduction of GDPR, introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) to the operating system of the 1bn active iPhones in the world. This new feature requires advertisers to ask for explicit permission when they want to access advertising IDs across apps. Then Google rang the death knell for third-party cookies, when it announced its new tool, Topics, to replace them. No matter how you look at it, the bottom line is that cookies and advertising IDs are set to disappear in the near future, and have no chance of surviving the combined efforts of governmental bodies, industry players and the consumers themselves.

“From the very beginning, we wanted to create a technology that was independent from the decisions of giants like Google and Apple, with a strong conviction that this tech should be anchored in privacy protection,” explains Pasquet.

Some companies quickly followed suit, but many have not. “I am very disappointed to see that not many brands have shifted to a privacy-first model, still measuring on a last-click method and continuing to ‘spray and pray’,” says Laricea Roman, Head of Digital Marketing at Boohoo Group, which is partnering with Ogury. Such old-school, unfocused tactics seem all the more outdated now that consumers are less and less inclined to share their personal data for advertising purposes.

“Privacy regulations, increasing consumer awareness about data usage and the disappearance of advertising IDs will culminate in a wholesale reinvention of the advertising industry,” Pasquet predicts. Previously, advertisers could tie online behaviour back to a certain device, but that door into users’ habits is slamming shut, and the result will be a titanic battle between adtech players. Rivals to companies such as Ogury will have to adapt to the new framework by necessity, though they may not be armed with the same degree of consumer knowledge, and are likely to remain on the back foot.

Any advertisers that didn’t see the writing on the wall will be limited to their own networks, without the capacity to analyse interests fostered outside the few websites they have access to. Moreover, because the restrictions in iOS are coming into force now, latecomers will not be able to replicate data that savvy firms have already learned from. The advertising industry’s necessary pivot to a privacy-first model is quite a hurdle, and customers, brands and investors will quickly identify who are the non-runners, and who are the winners.