OpenAudience Access: A Destination to Sell and Activate Your Data

In this edition of OpenFocus, we take a closer look at OpenAudience Access with Rich Calkins, director of product management at OpenX. 

To Data Providers and Brands, We’re Way More Than an Ad Exchange

People know OpenX as a supply-side platform (SSP) that provides access to high-quality inventory across all major formats and channels, including display, mobile, video and CTV. If you follow us with any kind of regularity, you know we have been at the forefront of ad-tech innovation since our founding in 2008.

That side of the business is alive and well, but we’ve never seen ourselves as just a supplier of inventory. A large part of our role lies in helping the advertising ecosystem prepare for the future. What’s needed most of all is access to high-quality and unique data for targeting across the open web, including CTV. We saw it as a call to help data providers come together with advertisers to meet that goal.

In that spirit, in 2019, we introduced OpenAudience, and in 2021, we introduced OpenAudience Access (OA Access). Both have delivered meaningful results to the data providers who use it to layer their data onto actual inventory, as well as brands that use it to find interesting and unique audience data. This post explains the value that OA Access provides retailers and data owners who wish to monetize their data. If you’re not familiar with the “other” OpenX, read on.

OpenAudience: What You Need to Know

To understand our role in bringing data providers and advertisers together, you’ll need to know the ABCs of OpenAudience Access and its benefit to you, a data provider.

Marketers, as you no doubt know, dedicate the bulk of their ad budgets in walled gardens because they can reach highly targeted audiences with 1:1 addressability and personalization. We built OpenAudience in order to offer that same level of targeting and seamless activation on the open web.

OpenAudience is a platform with OpenAudience Match (OA Match) at its core. OA Match is a user identity graph that’s applied to the OpenX Exchange. We enrich the trillions of ad requests we see daily across desktop, mobile and CTV devices with our identity graph. To ensure high match rate, OA Match leverages partnerships with recognized device graph leaders such as LiveRamp, TapAd, Experian and others.

Importantly, the OpenAudience graph is diverse and data agnostic. Retailers and digital audience solution companies can onboard off-line and online data so that it can be activated via cross-channel campaigns. This is where OpenAudience shines.

This unique supply-side identity graph is what enables OpenAudience data partners to sell their target audiences in a way that combines the scale of the open web, with the same level of audience matching, addressability and precision of the walled gardens.

But that’s just the start. In addition to your first-party data, OA Access users can also use OpenAudience’s free third-party audience segments to enhance their offering and solve their clients’ needs.

Monetize Your Data with OpenAudience Access

OpenAudience Access is one of the features of the OpenAudience platform. It’s designed for companies — e.g., retailers, publishers and other data providers — that have unique data they want to monetize. It’s turnkey, so you can turn on this revenue stream in a matter of weeks and with very little effort.

Let’s say you have unique data assets you’d like to monetize. How do you go about turning on the spigot? First, you onboard your first-party data, standard digital IDs and/or fully hashed PII, to OpenAudience (we’ve streamlined data ingestion so it requires minimal time and effort for the people in your company). Once that straightforward process is complete, it’s available for advertisers to purchase.

Your data works the same as the segments you may have living in specific DSPs and data marketplaces. The convenience of OpenAudience is that we map your audiences directly to the OpenX supply without any additional hops that may negatively impact match rates. That also means that you and your data customers pay fewer middlemen.

Then, whenever an advertiser wants to buy your audience, your team simply goes to the OpenAudience dashboard and creates a Deal ID. Your customer can then use that Deal ID to target your audiences wherever they’re on the open web. It doesn’t matter in the least which DSP your customers want to use, as the Deal ID is universal.

You, of course, set your own fees for your data, and we’ll collect them on your own behalf. We’ll cut you a check at the end of the month for every impression that was purchased using your data.

Use Your Off-line Data to Target Online Users

One of the key OpenAudience use cases is the ability to use off-line data (e.g., records stored in your CRM system) to target an audience online, including on CTV.

Through OA Match, OpenAudience is able to join hashed emails, hashed names, hashed addresses, hashed phone numbers or non-PII digital identifiers in your possession to online and CTV users. This is particularly useful to data providers and advertisers who want to sell data and reach audiences as they watch CTV on a smart TV, as opposed to streaming video content on a mobile device or a computer.

Key Benefits of OpenAudience Access

• DSP Agnostic. OpenX has integrations with over 70 DSPs, which means your data customers are free to use your data on whichever DSP they want. And that, in turn, means you can service all of your clients.
• Rest Easy. We provide end-to-end support, from getting your data on-boarded to training to troubleshooting. If you need help, our dedicated activation team is there for you. We also understand that once your data is onboarded and available for sale, you have revenue at stake. If you have a client who experiences any kind of issue activating your data, our support teams will address it ASAP.
• High Match Rate. With access to thousands of different publishers and trillions of requests seen, your segments are far more likely to match to actual users. The more we can match in real time, the more opportunity you have to earn revenue from your audience.
• Truly Turnkey. We offer a fully automated ingestion process. Send us your updates to your segments, and we can take it from there.

Many companies, such as Captify and Walgreens Advertising Group, already use OpenAudience Access to turn their data into revenue. If you have a robust CRM database you are interested in monetizing, email BuyerDevelopment@openx.com or contact us.