[RAMP – LiveRamp] Beyond the cookie

The diffuse nature of LiveRamp’s solution makes it hard to understand, so I thought I’d revisit a few points from my last LiveRamp post.  Here again is the marketer’s challenge:

“When you walk into a Nordstrom and purchase a bow tie, the details of that transaction will be stored in a database alongside the phone number, email address, and home address that you provided when you signed up for Nordstrom’s loyalty program.  In any given day, you might be perusing Tech Crunch on your iPhone, logging into the Wall Street Journal from your work PC, checking Facebook on your iPad, offering up opportunities for Nordstrom to present you an ad for, say, cuff links to go along with that bow tie.  But how does Nordstrom (or the agency it is working with), associate you, the physical person who walked into the store, with you, the person browsing websites across various devices?”

Before activating an online targeting campaign through a DSP like Trade Desk, an advertiser might upload first party data (date of last customer interaction, # of website visits, open rates on emails)¹ into LiveRamp and augment it with third-party data (household income, marital status, age, gender, zip)² from a vendor like Experian in order to have a clearer sense of what you’re all about.  To connect the records of one database to the other, LiveRamp finds a key identifier, like a phone number or email address, that is specific to each record (no two people share the same email address) and that both databases share.  To anonymize the data, LiveRamp replaces the shared identifier, the thing that can be used to identify a specific person, with an IdentityLink.  So now, the marketer can target specific individuals (who are stable), rather than cookies (which decay), or mobile device IDs (which may not be unique since the same person can own multiple devices). 

LiveRamp’s predecessor company, RapLeaf, was a sketchy data broker that sold to marketers the personal information that it scraped from social media sites³.  When that business model didn’t take, RapLeaf began enlisting (and in some cases, paying) a wide network of websites to deliver the email addresses of their users for purposes of targeting those users with ads.  A few years after enduring the blowback of a 2010 Wall Street Journal expose revealing that RapLeaf had transmitted personally identifiable information of consumers to its ad clients (oops!), RapLeaf got out of data brokerage altogether, leaving the onboarding business, LiveRamp.

LiveRamp has since positioned itself instead as a safe, neutral middleman between data sellers and buyers.  There are hundreds of thousands of datasets out there of varying and often dubious quality, none of which individually offers a comprehensive view of consumers.  LiveRamp vets those datasets and brings the legit ones together in one place, where buyers can easily search and access them.  This matchmaking service has become especially valuable since Facebook stopped offering third-party data providers on its platform, leaving advertisers to source 3P data on their own.  Through LiveRamp’s “data store”, marketers can buy data related to demographics, purchasing behavior, browsing behavior, geo-location, and in-market signals (people “in the market” for a purse)⁴ from over 150 providers.  Just as eBay maintains that it is a marketplace rather than a retailer and as Facebook claims it is a platform rather than a media property, LiveRamp insists it is merely a data exchange, not a vendor.