We are rapidly approaching a make-or-break moment for marketers.

After years of digital transformation and technological innovation, brands and advertisers are facing a new reality: digital marketing is suddenly becoming harder, not easier. New privacy regulations make it harder for advertisers to target prospective and repeat customers. The impending death of both third-party cookies and mobile ad identifiers will wipe out key data sources for companies that don’t have their own first-party resources. And the current economic downturn appears to be leading to a decrease in advertising investments, putting new pressure on marketers to do more with less.

In order to stay above water, advertisers will need their operations to be as efficient as possible and their campaign insights as accurate as possible. To achieve these goals, they must pay attention to an oft-overlooked enabling metric, the match rate.  Defined simply, match rate is the percentage of a marketer’s audience data that can be tied to its media buys. With high match rates, marketers are better able to maximize ROI. With poor match rates, marketers are essentially taking shots in the dark — with similarly poor results.

The Match Rate Breakthrough

Last week, Blockgraph and Kantar announced the results of a new integration that facilitated improved convergent TV measurement capabilities.  Combining Blockgraph’s Identity Operating System (IDoS) with Kantar’s extensive panel data sets enabled Kantar to measure the impact of their clients’ convergent TV ad campaigns. Since the integration, Kantar’s match rates with TV partners have increased by an incredible 10X — a dramatic increase that will lead directly to improved performance and increased ROI.

We’ve always known the potential benefit of matching client data with TV/ISP operator data, but this partnership offers real, quantifiable proof of the value in convergent TV measurement. Even as the market heads into uncertain waters, marketers can now use these tools to elevate their targeting and measurement capabilities on campaigns of all sizes.

What It Means for Marketers

The Blockgraph-Kantar partnership provides an answer to the three key challenges facing marketers today:

“Privacy 2.0”: Maintaining consumer privacy is no longer a “nice-to-have” — it’s a requirement mandated by government regulators. The marketing industry needs technology that can support direct matching and granular insights while maintaining the anonymity and privacy controls that the government requires and all data holders desire. The Blockgraph-Kantar partnership is built on Blockgraph’s IDoS, which was purpose-built to provide privacy-focused targeting and measurement solutions to the market.

Loss of key signals: In the last 12 months, Apple and Google made consequential changes to their advertising technologies, making it significantly more difficult for marketers to target audiences using third-party data. Google continues to move towards eliminating the third-party cookie, while Apple’s app tracking transparency (ATT) policy requires marketers to ask for customer consent before tracking them - both effectively removing the lionshare of traditional data matching signals. Improvements to match rates will be necessary to help minimize the drop off between increasingly scarce identifiers, and ensure that more audience members can be accurately targeted and measured without the need for third-party data.

Tightening ad market: These improvements to match rate and overall efficiency will make it possible for brands and advertisers of all sizes to remain competitive in a down market. Previously, only the biggest brands and campaigns had the scale and high-quality data required to inform a more precise level of targeting and measurement. The Blockgraph-Kantar partnership offers proof that marketers of any scale and industry can make the most out of existing first-party resources without compromising privacy.

The success of this partnership shows what can be achieved when two innovators put their talent and resources together to solve a key industry challenge. We can’t wait to see what’s next as Blockgraph and Kantar continue to work together to fuel the future of advertising.

Jason Manningham is Blockgraph's CEO and Co-Founder.

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