Ahead of taking the stage at ATS Paris 2017 to discuss machine learning, Cecile Douillard, commercial director EMEA, IPONWEB, explains for ExchangeWire how to make the most of bid enrichment.

Everybody wants data: advertisers, to accurately identify their consumers, and media owners, to sell audiences and price their inventory fairly. Data is everywhere, largely accessible through existing walled gardens, data management platforms (DMPs), and direct integrations; yet the most valuable audiences are not always there when you need them. While it can be targeted at bid-through segments, both generic and customised data haven’t been bundled with media. Until now…

Bid enrichment is not a new buzzword – it’s actually happening and it’s all about data monetisation. Bid enrichment is now giving the RTB ecosystem the opportunity to trade media bundled with data on a level playing field. Beyond fairness, it’s very much about commoditising access to audiences. The concept of bid enrichment was born out of a need to unify and normalise the way audiences are traded in an RTB context. Most importantly, it addresses issues with data monetisation, for both the supply and the demand sides.

What is bid enrichment? And what’s in it for you?
Bid enrichment brings the full suite of audience targeting capabilities to the programmatic world more efficiently, helping brands show more relevant and suitable offers for products and services to individual consumers, ensuring better digital experiences.

Experian (a marketing services provider that leverages customer data to empower insight-driven marketing through technology and services) is already making full use of bid enrichment across a number of brands and verticals.

“Experian data segments, already available in other digital channels, are now accessible at scale in programmatic via bid enrichment. This also allows Experian to help third-party data owners, such as transactional/purchase data owners and niche data providers, to onboard and monetise their audiences via the safe and secure Experian personal data handling processes”, explains Alex Tonello, head of partnership development, Experian Digital Media and Marketing Services.

Bid enrichment benefits all participants of the programmatic ecosystem in many ways:

1. Incremental revenue stream

Data owners become an integral part of the media proposition, whether from a planning or an execution standpoint. Using a bid enrichment framework, they can now monetise their data in a consistent and secure manner, via deal IDs. Put in simple terms, they can sell custom audiences as well as continue to drive revenue from their existing customer base and their general taxonomy.

The supply side benefits from increased bid density, as the original and non-enriched bid requests continue to be pumped into the ecosystem. As such, bid enrichment doesn’t cannibalise publishers’ revenue.

2. Scalability
Looking at the current consumption of data, whether first- or third-party, it too often seems confined to the use of DMPs, or integrations via DSPs. Trading enriched bid requests opens the door to real scalability.

Bid enrichment is secure, anonymised, incremental and, most importantly, it is scalable. It is accessible through the full set of sellers on BidSwitch.

3. Contextual value for buyers
As mentioned earlier, bid enrichment brings value for everyone and this includes the buy-side, whether advertisers or agencies. The former now have access to the relevant audience and are able to update campaigns in real time for better overall performance. The latter can simply execute large-scale, customised audience buys for their clients. Bundling media with data brings efficiencies to their media planning, which is now much better aligned with advertisers’ KPIs.

Purchasing media to target particular audiences is a crucial process in advertising, one that buyers have been executing on for decades. Bid enrichment is bringing buying audiences and media back together and delivering it in a way advertisers are used to. It’s a new way of doing an old thing.

4. Control
With bid enrichment, access to data becomes universal. It alleviates storage costs, eliminates the immediate requirement of multiple integrations, improves campaign execution, and maximises performance. Put simply, it brings together audience trading, which is currently far too scattered.

It is control for sellers, control for data owners who protect their assets and avoid data leakage, and control for the buyers who can execute on their targeted audiences more effectively.