Addressable advertising is transforming to align with the privacy-first digital landscape that’s emerging today. Moving forward, addressable marketing will demand innovative approaches to audience building that do not compromise on compliance. Here, we look at the evolution of addressable advertising and outline new ways in which publishers and brands can build addressable audiences at scale.
What is addressable advertising?
Addressable advertising enables businesses to deliver highly targeted ads to specific individuals or groups across multiple devices. Unlike traditional mass, “pay and spray” advertising, which broadcasts the same message to broad audiences, addressable advertising leverages data insights – such as demographics, behaviours, and purchase history – to tailor ads to the right people at the right time. This approach improves ad relevance, increases engagement, and maximises ROI by minimising wasted impressions.
What are addressable audiences?
Addressable audiences are specific groups of consumers or businesses that can be targeted with addressable advertising. Traditionally, addressable audiences have been largely built using digital identifiers such as third-party cookies, mobile device IDs, and other tracking technologies to recognise and segment users across websites, apps, and devices.
Third-party cookies have played a crucial role in this process by allowing advertisers to track user behaviour across the web, enabling detailed profiling based on their browsing history, interests, and interactions. Similarly, mobile device IDs have been widely used to link user activity across mobile apps, providing valuable insights for personalised advertising. These identifiers have allowed advertisers to group individuals into audiences based on demographics, purchase intent, or behavioural patterns, ensuring that targeted messaging reaches the most relevant audiences.
To activate addressable audiences, advertisers have traditionally used data management platforms (DMPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to match identifiers across multiple channels, creating a unified view of the consumer. Cross-device tracking has further refined audience targeting by linking third-party cookies and mobile device IDs with other data points, enabling brands to reach the same user whether they are browsing on a laptop, watching connected TV, or using a mobile app.
How addressable audiences are changing
Growing privacy concerns and regulatory changes, such as GDPR and the deprecation of third-party cookies, have led to a shift away from these traditional tracking methods. With Apple’s restrictions on IDFA tracking and browser companies’ restrictions on tracking cookies, advertisers are now focusing on alternatives to build and maintain addressable audiences in a privacy-compliant manner.
Already this is having an impact, with advertisers and publishers alike looking to move away from invasive tracking and make better use of their consented first-party data. Many are having success in this regard. In the US, for example, more than two in five marketers commonly transact on first-party data. However, for first-party data to be able to deliver addressable audiences at scale, brands and publishers need to find a way to link their data with web users without breaching data privacy laws.
The role of telco-verified IDs in addressable marketing
The challenge facing brands is, therefore, a combination of both access to and safe activation of audiences at scale. Here, telco-verified IDs offer a way forward.
Telcos can leverage their network intelligence to offer brands a unique and verified transactional ID generated by publishers and added to the ad request for distribution through the advertising ecosystem. The telco-verified IDs are, therefore, able to drive scaled and fraud-free audience activation, using first-party information from both telcos and publishers/brands to support both re-targeting and personalisation.
Telco-verified IDs use cutting-edge technology to associate requested audiences with each ID, which is filtered to send specific responses to each buy-side platform. Valid only for a single transaction, the ID vanishes after each transaction, making it ideal for a privacy-first world.
This innovative approach turbocharges audience addressability and future-proofs brand and publisher advertising models.
An addressability solution for all players
Addressable audiences remain a key component of successful advertising, but current headwinds, in the form of regulatory challenges altering the underlying ad ecosystem infrastructure, are restricting both their availability and activation.
Telco-verified IDs will enable publishers to increase the value of their website inventory, improve yield, enhance advertising performance and drive repeat ad spend. Brands, meanwhile, will be able to use their first-party audiences to retarget users when they are on alternative websites, increasing their reach and enabling them to tailor their creative better. Consumers also benefit – both from having their privacy respected, and from receiving more relevant, personalised advertising.
Addressable audiences are the secret sauce to effective personalised advertising. With telco-verified IDs these audiences can be enabled with greater accuracy, scale, and compliance than in the past, helping to make advertising more effective and customer-centric.
