Another 3rd-party cookie replacement, and about going digital-first: Wednesday’s daily brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, marketers, I guess we should start taking Clubhouse seriously.

I’ve seen an influx of stories about opportunities on the new audio networking app Clubhouse. Not to advertise, but to promote brand reputation by offering valuable content. That content, as I understand it, comes in the form of live spoken word. No recordings, no texts, no private messages — just conversation. So a brand better have something of value to talk about.

Brands are starting to sponsor rooms, individual brand representatives are building followings and influencers are doing their usual thing — talking about brands. Of course, all this is hearsay, as I’ve never been on Clubhouse. Right now, it’s invitation (and iPhone) only — something which is likely to change.

I am tempted to ask around for an invite, but where am I going to find those extra few hours every day to hang out and get noticed?

Kim Davis
Editorial Director

LiveRamp’s alternative to third-party cookies

LiveRamp’s alternative to third-party cookies is its Authenticated Traffic Solution, or ATS. “We’ve been investing substantially over the past four years in…ATS, which enables publishers to connect their first-party identities (a user login on the New York Times, for example, or the Washington Post) to our people-based platform,” said Travis Clinger, SVP, addressability and ecosystem. “As we see the end of the third-party cookie looming, and the changes to the IDFA happening this spring, we expect to continue to scale ATS. Already we have about one in five people logging in on the ATS network, and we expect to continue scaling that over the coming months, allowing marketers to continue to connect with their consumers across any channel without the need for a third-party cookie.”

Anonymous traffic, consisting of users who don’t log in to websites, eludes the grasp of ATS. “Exactly,” Clinger agreed, “but a login can be a variety of events. For example, it could be clicking a newsletter link, signing up for text alerts, or using a widget on the site to engage in comments or discussion.”

LiveRamp has also announced a partnership with Media.net, the international contextual advertising business, allowing marketers to leverage contextual and addressable advertising together, rather than in separate siloes. Contextual is not, in itself, the future of the ecosystem, Clinger emphasized. “But we’ve always believed there’s an opportunity to pair contextual with addressability.

Read more here.

Vevo is targeting ads by mood  

The music video network Vevo is using AI to facilitate more effective targeting by zeroing in on the emotional connection.

The global network this week launched Moods, an AI-powered product that groups videos by emotional category — so far, options are empowered, heartfelt, fun, and impassioned — allowing users to design their listening experience and advertisers to place campaigns in an emotionally congruent environment. The rationale is that aligning ad theme and tone with relevant content will boost consumers’ ad recall and brand favorability.

From a scientific standpoint, the case for Moods is well documented in cognitive science research. When music elicits the emotional responses so familiar to us, a chemical chain reaction takes place that reinforces those musical-emotional connections, which in turn are associated with enhanced memory. In brief: We hear music → we feel an emotion → we’re more likely to remember whatever we’re looking at in the moment. 

From a brand perspective, it’s a no-brainer: Users get the ease and novelty of a mood-based playlist, enhancing Vevo’s brand affinity while advertisers potentially strengthen connections with hyper-targeted messaging.  

Vevo worked with the music data company Musixmatch to identify and tag videos based on various musical features of the songs in its catalog. A proprietary model built by Musixmatch then assigns a mood to each Vevo video’s metadata tag for seamless contextual targeting.

Why We Care: For several years now, companies have been wondering how to use AI to unlock the potential treasure hiding inside the huge amounts of data particular to their consumers and products. This is an example of how applied AI can deliver on the promises of seamlessness and personalization in a way that also benefits marketers. 

How many martech companies will go digital-first

Drift, the conversational B2B marketing and sales platform has announced it’s going digital first, meaning that staff will work remotely — permanently. Explaining the decision, CEO and cofounder David Cancel began from the premise that the world has changed indefinitely.

This presented three possibilities: insist on going back to the old ways of doing things; go fully remote; or create a hybrid of the two. He rejected the hybrid option as “inequitable” — from experience, he knew that remote workers would feel left out of onsite workplace interactions.

With its popular in-person Hypergrowth events (pre-pandemic) and emphasis on conversation, Drift has always emphasized human connections. If Drift can go digital first, how many martech companies — which should have a head start in terms of virtual infrastructure — will follow? Full disclosure: Third Door Media, publishers of MarTech Today, is a natively remote business. 

Read David Cancel’s reasoning here.

Quote of the day

“You get to send one MOPs-related post to alert people you are in trouble. What do you post?I’ll start — You should score email opens as part of your lead-scoring model.” Jason Raisleger, Sr. Marketing Automation Consultant, Perkuto.