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Introducing ‘Connect’: Bringing Media Buyers Closer to Their Target Audiences

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By Dio Espinal, Senior Manager, Product Marketing
May 24, 2022

Today, PubMatic is launching Connect, a comprehensive and fully integrated platform to enable media buyers to seamlessly connect with their target audiences across the open internet.

We have seen the tides changing in favor of publishers, who have always played a significant role in building direct relationships with consumers and are now in a pivotal position to develop publisher-managed first-party data signals that buyers can tap into for privacy-safe, scaled activation. This has influenced a new approach in how buyers manage inventory standards, audience and media investment planning, and identity strategies – bringing buyers closer to their supply-side partnerships.

Sell-side targeting is a very interesting industry development. By informing the sell-side of the targeting, advertisers can enable ‘traffic shaping’ of the right bid opportunities to the campaign. “This results in a definitive increase in reach and confirms the strength of sell-side targeting,” said Kasper Skou, CEO and Co-Founder of Semasio, one our partners.

This has strengthened our perspective that bringing audience targeting to the supply side is more important now than ever to ensure buyers can continue reaching their target audiences across channels, devices, and screens. Our customers have consistently expressed interest in leveraging all cookie-alternative targeting strategies in one central location to easily understand which signal, whether alternative ID, contextual, or even publisher-defined signals, will deliver on their campaign objectives.

Connect is one of the only unbiased audience addressability offerings that combines in one platform many of the preferred signal approaches, including known identity, first- and second-party data, contextual signals, seller-defined audiences, and modeled audiences.

By bringing audience targeting to the sell-side, Connect helps buyers with greater control over how inventory and data are packaged and transacted to drive the best performance for their campaigns. As a result, buyers can get closer to inventory, achieve better match rates, gain more detailed reporting and analytics, and increase their access to global omnichannel inventory across display, video, mobile app, and connected TV.

Through Connect, buyers can:

  • Onboard your own CRM data to build first-party audience planning and activation strategies
  • Access cookie-alternative data signals, including publisher first-party data, alternative IDs, contextual, and content object signals to package relevant audiences for digital activation
  • Leverage PubMatic’s 30+ DMP, DSP
  • Deliver on key KPIs from custom packaging and deal optimizations by PubMatic’s addressability team

Advertisers that have applied their targeting strategies with us have seen remarkable success. Recently, an advertiser ran a test that showed when audience targeting was layered on the SSP side, it had 2x more reach than the identical campaign in the DSP side – with a 16% uplift in viewability and a 21% increase in CTR.

Learn more about Connect here.