Audience Data Sessions: Q&A with Equativ

Can you introduce yourself and tell us more about your role at Equativ?

My name is Guillaume Ballin and I’m the Director of Data Partnerships at Equativ. I manage the relationships with our third-party data, identity, and semantic partners. My role involves helping publishers, advertisers, curators, and agencies enhance the targeting of their programmatic campaigns through strategic data partnerships. 

Can you discuss the evolving Supply-Side Platform (SSP) landscape and how Equativ is uniquely positioned within it?

It’s all about efficiency. As SSPs sit closer to publishers we are in an ideal position to help ensure that buying platforms get the most relevant bids while bringing the most valuable demand to our media owner partners. We are seeing a convergence of capabilities on both the demand and supply-side, where platforms on either end of the supply chain work to create more efficient and direct programmatic pathways.

Our background as a publisher-facing business remains core to our DNA. We understand the business needs of media owners and the technology they need to monetize their inventory to the greatest expanse of buyers, whether in the open auction or through direct deals.

With targeting, our market-leading addressability solutions benefit both sellers and buyers. Publishers can use a data platform to enrich and segment their first-party data and monetize either through direct deals on our publisher platform or by offering access to their audiences using our Equativ Buyer Connect curation platform. 

This continuous investment in innovation is what sets us apart. We’re leading the transformation of the Advanced TV advertising landscape with investments in key components of the supply chain: the ad server, server-side ad insertion, SSP and curation. Moreover, our acquisitions of DynAdmic (managed service DSP), Nowtilus (server-side ad insertion), and Sharethrough (SSP with ad-enhancement capabilities) allow us to innovate even faster and continue to bring more efficiency to both our publisher and buy-side partners.

Equativ Buyer Connect was launched in 2020, with recent enhancements to the platform making it even more advanced and aligned with market needs. Throughout its evolution, its central purpose has remained the same - to give buyers greater control and bring them closer to publishers.

EBC offers more efficiency to both buyers and sellers through curation while also functioning as an enterprise platform that lets other businesses create and package their own media and/or proprietary technology.

Our commitment to addressability increases buying scale across both cookied and non-cookied environments and allows more efficient and scaled data activation. Our ability to host audience segments—which includes brand first-party CRM data, publisher first-party data, and third-party data—dramatically limits the severe data loss of cookie syncing.

We also host alternative IDs including those by LiveRamp, UTIQ, ID5, and UID 2.0. This helps marketers reach audiences in environments such as Safari, where audience targeting is severely limited while helping publishers mitigate revenue loss from traffic coming from cookieless browsers.  

So one of the major value propositions of our curation platform is this ability to offer superior data activation. Ultimately, this leads to more performant media buys for marketers and more demand for publishers.  

Based on the positive feedback we’ve received from our customers, we believe this partnership will contribute to helping us reinforce our position as a leading curation platform and data marketplace. 

 
As previously mentioned, the trend toward supply-side curation is transforming the foundation of programmatic advertising.

In addition, we’re excited about the growth we’re seeing across the industry in retail media and the continued focus on leveraging first-party data. Our EBC platform can also be used by retailers to ensure their messages reach the right people at the right time. By incorporating EBC into a commerce media strategy, retailers can target consumers with precision to enhance the consumer journey from discovery to conversion.

As we continue to strengthen our powerful and user-friendly curation platform, it’s impossible not to be excited about what the future holds and our role as a trusted and independent leader in this transformative era.