Beachfront, Beeswax and LiveRamp join forces on connected TV

Programmatic advertising’s growth in the streaming space is receiving a boost after three ad tech companies agreed a partnership to enable advertisers to improve audience targeting while operating within privacy constraints.

Beachfront, an independent video ad management platform, has teamed up with "bidder-as-a-service" platform Beeswax to adopt and enable LiveRamp’s IdentityLink.

IdentityLink is a "people-based, privacy-first" identifier for connected TV, as well as display and mobile campaigns, which is meant to provide a solution for advertising within tighter controls around third-party cookies and user data privacy. LiveRamp describes the tool as having a "neutral position, secure ecosystem infrastructure" and has a people-based opt-out mechanism for users.

It allows Beeswax users, as well as ad buyers more generally, to increase the scale and impact of connected TV campaigns activated across Beachfront’s portfolio of video inventory. Meanwhile, Beachfront’s publisher partners can monetise their inventory among Beeswax’s advertising clients using IdentityLink as the core identifier. 

While TV users, particularly in the UK and US, are using more connected TV/streaming services, it may be difficult for advertisers to effectively reach them on ad-funded streaming platforms without building a full picture of a person, known as identity resolution.

Identity resolution – the stitching together of disparate data points to create a consistent ID for a user – should enable better audience targeting and allow advertisers to manage the frequency of advertising, even when buying programmatic ads on different platforms, such as All4 and ITV Hub in the UK.

Tools such as IdentityLink are being developed in response to a market expectation that third-party cookies, the traditional method of tracking internet users across the web, will soon die out. Google said it would deprecate third-party cookies on its popular Chrome browser within two years, while smaller rivals Safari (Apple) and Firefox (Mozilla) have already blocked them.

Travis Clinger, vice-president of global strategy and partnerships at LiveRamp, said: "The cookieless future presents the ecosystem with an incredible opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the open internet, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with partners to move beyond the cookie."