Ongoing uncertainty over the future (or lack thereof) of third-party cookies is increasingly shifting advertisers towards CTV, where they can leverage first-party data to target engaged audiences. Hightouch, a customer data platform (CDP), is expanding its offering into CTV, where it aims to facilitate that targeting, alongside measuring the incremental impact of CTV campaigns.
The Series B startup already works with a number of high-profile brands, including PetSmart and Weight Watchers, allowing them to create and activate audiences across a range of paid media. These are advertisers with vast amounts of customer data, and while that level of first-party data is not necessary to get started on Hightouch, the company explains there are clear benefits.
“If we think about Weight Watchers as an example, they have millions of members who are active subscribers of their services,” says Ian Maier, AdTech Lead at Hightouch. “And so for them, there’s a lot of value in, for example, suppressing all of those active members from their acquisition campaigns. If we extend that to CTV, and the high impression cost of CTV, that value starts to multiply very quickly.”
Hightouch grants advertisers access to a user interface where they can define their audience, and have it available for targeting suppression “within a day or two.” Maier likens the user experience to activating an audience on Facebook, but extending that reach into OEM CTV platforms, such as LG Ad Solutions, Roku Advertising and Samsung Ads.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies now starting to be able to take first-party targeted campaigns that have worked really well in more digital mediums, like Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc, and rebuild those campaigns across the CTV ecosystem, where they can get quite a bit more reach and engagement,” says Maier.
Streamlining CTV
But the move into CTV comes with its own set of challenges when it comes to integrating first-party data. Where demand-side platforms (DSP) have APIs that can accept first-party offline identifiers, Maier notes that complexities arise when synching data with different OEM platforms. “There aren’t first-class APIs, the identity data that they can accept varies across different platforms,” he says. “And so really it comes down to, how can we streamline it in a way where it really feels like the same process that you’d experience syncing that data to a DSP?”
The other main challenge is measurement, an issue exacerbated by the fragmented nature of the CTV ecosystem, especially for advertisers looking for the closed-loop measurement available in Meta and Google’s walled gardens. Hightouch offers measurement capabilities both built into the CTV product and via third-party measurement vendors, including Dynata and iSpot.
In terms of in-built measurement, the product enables advertisers to run incrementality tests, or “Splits”, as part of the activiation process. This allows marketers to measure brand lift and conversions across different holdout groups, according to Maier.
“A lot of companies are starting to shift their attention in measurement to looking at, for example, incrementality and marketing mix modeling (MMM),” he says. “One of our launch customers is one of the US’s largest food delivery apps. They were able to build in holdout testing, so don’t show CTV ads to this percentage of the audience, and do show it to this percentage, and now we can actually compare the incremental lift in sales across those two groups.”
Hitting targets
On the targeting side, Hightouch enables advertisers to create audiences for a variety of use cases, including suppression, win-back and upsell campaigns. Maier uses the example of the same food delivery company looking to get the most out of their large customer base. “A lot of their focus is really around maximising the lifetime value (LTV) of those customers, rather than just acquiring new customers,” he says. “And so being able to, for example, upsell active customers to their premium subscription, or reactivating customers who maybe haven’t purchased on their platform for a long period of time, there’s a lot of value that they can get out of that.”
Hightouch also seeks to differentiate itself by sitting “on top of” the advertiser’s data warehouse, granting the company access to “a lot more data than a traditional data activation or onboarding platform.” And because the company does not store any customer data itself, Maier says Hightouch makes it easier to activate across regions with different data privacy restrictions.
“If you’re advertising in the US and in the EU, it’s not just about sending the data to two different data points,” he explains. “There are a lot of considerations that you and the vendor need to make in ensuring that you’re compliant in the EU.” A key consideration here is that the data needs to be stored in the same region as it is being deployed, making Hightouch’s “warehouse native” approach more straightforward for brands looking to advertise across different regions.
“We can process within the advertiser’s warehouse, and then send to the end platform, with The Trade Desk, for example, or an EU ID partner,” notes Maier. “And that has been very powerful, especially when dealing with very complicated systems with other data onboarding providers.”
