Future-Proofing your Newsrooms : Transcribed
Chirdeep:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on Future Proofing your Newsrooms. I have with me, John Haake who is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Leverage Labs and together we will be talking a lot in detail about customer data platforms in short called CDS and how you can use first party data to improve audience profiling and engagement on your site engagement as well as understanding for your audience better to look at better revenue models, right. I, uh, the brief introduction. I run Quintype and we work with publishers across the world to provide the technology platform for their needs, which includes the CMS, comment management systems, subscription management systems. A page builder, mobile apps, the entire stack that a publisher would require. And John if you can introduce yourself and leverage labs and we can get started from there.
John:
Hi everyone, my name is John Haake. As mentioned I am VP of Sales and marketing for a company called Leverage Lab where a first party data consultancy with the Foundation in technology and that technology is the CDP, so we work with publishers large and small, B2B and B2C as well as advertisers and retailers to get the most value out of their first party data. Just doing a little sharing here. These are some of the companies that we work for. We were founded by Anne Marie Wills and Matt Bramble.
They come from the publishing world B2B company where they work together. That was sourced data later, I think it was acquired by Penton. And Emery was an early adopter of the CDP technology way back, you know, six or seven years ago before it was really the kind of the talk of the town that it is today. And she quickly kind of understood where there were immediate gaps. This was a marketers tool and allowed her to be able to leverage her first party data in ways that she hadn't been able to do. Before but certainly like to think that she could, she realized that this is a sophisticated technology and very few marketing departments actually have the kind of resources to be able to squeeze the most value out of an investment in the technology and in the first party data. So she and Matt went out on their own and basically built Leverage lab to span that chasm between the investment in the technology and actually getting a real ROI out of it. So Fast forward five or six years to today and Leverage lab is working with all these great companies that you see here. We've developed a playbook that allows publishers to actually get value out of CDP investment as quickly as possible and we have a lot of focus on revenue producing products, but that's not the only thing CDP does. Because you can create new first party data-driven revenue for sure, but you can also leverage that first party data to do things that you're already doing much better, more efficiently on a bigger scale.
So the impact of the CDP investment is actually pretty big and you know we built a company to ensure that those that invest in it actually get the most value out of it.
Chirdeep :
Great. Thanks, John. You mentioned customer data platforms and I do see a lot of your publishing clients using that. But a lot of them that we work with are still worried about which one to start looking at, a CDP or a DMP that most of them are used to already using. So getting into the details, what is the CDP and how is it different from a DMP?
John:
So there is a tremendous amount of overlap, kind of the highest level between a CDP and DMP. DMP has been around for about 15 years now and as you mentioned there's wide adoption for them on the publishing side and what a DMP allows publishers to do is be able to collect and start to segment a high value audience. And they do that by transacting on cookies. And so you can think of the difference. One of the biggest differences between a DMP and CDP is that a DMP is using cookies, both first party and third party cookies. But the audiences aren't known. They could be first party audiences for sure. A lot of DMP's are talking about their, you know their ability to be able to to collect and segment on 1st party data. That the MP's don't have known user profiles and that's what CDP does, it's like a DMP, it is a data platform. A CDP will drop a first party cookie on any visitors that come to your site. That first party or excuse me, that that user profile initially is an unknown profile. But you can start to collect all sorts of valuable behavioral data and it goes into that user profile and you know a user journey that has marketing hooks. Hopefully you can convince users to share more information about themselves, to the point where you actually collect some PII, personally identifiable information.
And that's usually through, you know, a registration page, a web form. There's any number of ways you can be able to collect that data. Ethically, right. And once that happens, that anonymous profile that the CDP has been collecting all the behavioral data on attaches the PII to it. So that profile becomes known. And then there's a next step, being able to identify that known user in different channels. So imagine being able to address that user and, you know, in the open web and SMS. And on their mobile device. And suddenly you're able to collect a mobile ID and you're collecting a telephone number, a mobile telephone number, and then that user, that known user becomes a connected user. And once you have a connected user profile, you're off to the races. There's any number of marketing and advertising executions that you can use against that user. So just like a DMP, a CDO allows you to segment audiences, but these segmented audiences are both unknown when you have an anonymous profile and known when you've got PII.
And you know as we're kind of moving forward towards a cookie list future, having a known profile or a connected profile is going to allow you to do all the wondrous things that you've been able to do the last 10 or 15 years. And do other things like be able to contact that that user and and you know the mobile channel with the SMS and the like. So the CDP I characterize as kind of the next generation that is building on the foundation of a DMP. Now also the DMP is they have a focus on paid media. So think digital display advertising and native advertising. And the like and CDP you can begin to execute against those high value audiences that you segment across more channels than you would with the DMP. So we're working with a lot of publishers that are looking to solve for getting rid of their DMP and using CDP functionality to kind of build the gap or build the vacuum. So I think more and more publishers are going to start doing that for sure.
Chirdeep :
That's pretty interesting. I'm just curious about, we've seen DMP's being used by publishers for, as you mentioned, ad targeting. What's the typical pattern of using CDPs within publishers, what have your clients used CPS for?
John:
So it is, it's not just an advertising or marketing tool. It allows you like I said to do all the things you're already doing as a publisher more efficiently on a greater scale. So let me start on some non-marketing or non-advertising use cases. So in the realm of audience development you're able to get a deeper relationship with the user by taking information that you've already gained from them, their behaviors, the kinds of content that they're consuming, the amount of time they spend with that content. A lot of CDP's will have machine learning. Algorithms that will, you know, have scoring like propensity and momentum, so you can build audiences based on that first party data that you've collected around their behaviors. So you can do things like, you know, do personalization, have an actual journey that is most relevant to your users, you can recommend content, something that we're seeing a lot in the last year. Is executions that support subscription strategies.
So imagine just knowing if a visitor is already a subscriber or not is a valuable piece of information, because if you have a subscriber come in, you can shoot them over to your single sign on or send them down another kind of lucrative journey. And if they're not a subscriber, you can send them down a path with the idea that they're going to convert into becoming a subscriber themselves. So just knowing that simple little fact, whether they're a current subscriber or not, allows you to do pretty sophisticated strategies around that to boost your goals. So that's kind of where the CDP really shines, is being able to customize and personalize that experience for the user. And when you do this and we, we've known this for a very long time, when you serve them a relevant experience, they're going to stick around longer. There's going to be more page views, they're going to consume more content. And as they do, you're able to collect more behavioral data around them to start to understand who they are. And that behavior provides publishers with a clear signal on what motivates that user, it's like not only it's like you know, you know topic or content affinities, but you know kind of in market targeting is where you can start to understand. It's like this person is researching this kind of purchase and we can determine that based on their behaviors and the content that they are consuming.
So you can be able to get a really deep understanding about who that audience member is because you're not just relying on a cookie. You're the CDP is collecting all this other data and then being able to synthesize that data in ways that make it actionable for marketers. So you know it is a great way to be able to build and scale your audiences and you know that's it's a numbers game, right. So being able to do that is critical for publishers these days. And then you are able to segment these users into high value audience segments. That you can begin to monetize against, right. So you can take that first party data audience segmentation and drive marketing services programs and advertising products. And at leverage lab, you know, we spent the last five or six years kind of developing a playbook around this. So there's this notion about being able to de-couple audience from inventory.
So as a publisher, you are limited by the number of impressions that you actually can deliver via your owned and operated inventory and typically that has been kind of the ceiling when it comes to being able to monetize against that. But this idea about being able to decouple audience for inventory allows a publisher to create a high value audience based on behaviors and their owned and operated inventory and then take that audience and make it available for an advertiser off site and other addressable channels. And once you do that you can run a lot of different strategies, for instance at the top of the marketing funnel is awareness, right? So say you've created a custom audience for a particular advertiser, whether they came to you with their audience and you found them on your site or you created it from scratch from your own traffic. But you have identified that this is a very specific audience for this advertiser but you only have so many impressions that you can offer that advertiser. So the equation is number impressions on, you know, CPM and that's your limit, right? But if you take that audience and you go out and find other impressions and you know, the addressable web, other paid impressions, you can start to, you know, run an arbitrage kind of strategy where I'm going to buy an impression for X amount of CPM and I'm going to sell that impression to my advertiser. Or X + 1, X plus two X + 3, you know pick your number right?
So this is suddenly a new revenue opportunity. This is an audience extension play using first party data. So you can go out and find that audience and really amp up the awareness beyond your limitations on your owned and operated well, you can take that kind of philosophy and turn it on its head and do content amplification which is basically going out and find that audience and driving them back into your owned and operated for your for your advertiser. Now you can run audience development supporting campaigns this way where you go out and find a high value audience and you bring them into your environment. So you can start to recognize these users and move them from unknown to known to connected. And you can do the very same thing for advertisers and drive that high value audience at a scale that you couldn't deliver in your owned and operated back into your owned and operated world on behalf of that advertiser.
You can point them to, you know, say they're running a sponsored content programmed on your own and operated. This is a really great way to get, you know, relevant eyeballs into that sponsored content. Way bigger scale than you, what you would be able to do in your owned and operated. So there's any number of ways. To be able to leverage this first party data, these high value audiences to drive revenue beyond what you're able to do today.
So let me kind of drill in deeper on these market forces that are actually creating this new opportunity for publishers. I've got a lot of passion here, so forgive me if I start to shout and wave my hands, but you know this slide kind of culminates a lot of these market forces. None of this is new. We've all heard it for several years now. So with GDPR and CPA in California, we're starting to see what you know, legislation is going to look like for everybody across the globe. This is the direction it's going and to characterize it as simply as I possibly can, it is basically changing from having your audience. Opt out of being tracked to actually giving them the ability to opt in, to give them the power to decide whether or not a publisher or website or advertiser for that means has the right to be able to track them. So this is kind of the basis of all the new privacy laws that you're starting to see across the globe. This is a good thing. We should look at the consumers and traffic. To our sites as our North Star and facilitate what they're trying to accomplish when they come to you know our our properties and then look for ways to be able to monetize on that responsibly all the while in the last you know 15 years or so. Facebook and then Google and then LinkedIn and now even Amazon are beginning to eat up all the media budgets out there to the point where publishers on the open web, which I imagine most of our audience today is, you're fighting over the crumbs, right?
So depending on who you're talking to the walled gardens are eating up, you know, anywhere from 80 to 90% of every. Every dollar spent towards paid media. So the pie that was getting bigger, our slice of the pie is actually getting smaller. And if you're a B2B publisher, it gets even more difficult because if you're doing something like I suggested about decoupling your audience from your inventory, your audience data, you see those users through a B2B lens as opposed to see lens and all the data on borders? Prefer a B2C lens. So, you know, think of Facebook, the information that you have provided Facebook is going to be your personal e-mail and not your employer's e-mail, right? So Facebook will match on a personal e-mail a lot more readily than they'll be able to match on a professional e-mail.
So B2B publishers see a match rate much lower on the consumer side where if you have a good list and you go to Facebook and you try to create a custom audience using your list you can expect you know 6570 maybe 80% match rate. If it is B2C, B2B publishers, you know they'll have something more like 30 or 40% match rate. So their scale begins to really diminish in comparison. So being able to understand who your audience is and not just through a B to B lens will allow B to be publishers to be able to address their audiences much better. And CDP facilitates that.
And then, you know, everyone's talked about it, the third party cookie is eventually going to disappear. I know Google pumped the brakes earlier this year, but it's going to happen and they are the last major browser that actually supports third party cookies. Mozilla or Apple with Safari, they got rid of this years ago, and the only reason why third party cookies actually are still relevant anymore is the market share that Chrome has. So Chrome still has the majority of the web traffic. So third party cookies are still viable at this point, but they're going away and this is a good thing for everyone involved.
They were a crutch and we shouldn't have depended on them to begin with. And these changes are going to encourage everyone in the ecosystem to actually facilitate a first party relationship with your consumers, your customers and your audiences. And I think ultimately this is going to shake out to be a very good thing for publishers because publishers own the relationship right and advertisers come to publishers to be able to leverage that relationship. So the more a publisher knows about an individual user, the more valuable that user profile is. And you do that by having a legitimate relationship with your audience. And you know and not just drop an anonymous cookie on the browser, but actually interact with them and find out what is important and what motivates them.
And ultimately that serves the user very well because they're getting personalized. Uh, relevant content where they might not otherwise. And then the publisher benefits because those audiences are even more valuable than what they've been marketing through third party cookies and DMP's and the like. So this is all good news. I'm very bullish about the future. I wish this would have happened a long time ago and it actually puts publishers back in the driver seat where they belong because unfortunately it's like since the advent of. Programmatic media buying publishers have basically had their lunch meeting at lunch money taken away from them and now this is a good reset on the entire infrastructure and it puts the publisher in a really good position because again, they own that first party relationship with the audiences.
Chirdeep :
Thanks John. That's very insightful. You mentioned a lot about third party cookies and I think the entire world is preparing for that at this point, which is. In a couple of years, third party cookies are pretty much going to be phased out and what, according to you, is the future of this bill? Publishers need to use DMPs and CDPs together. Will there be a transition away from DMPS to CPS and should we start thinking of transitioning to CPS at this point yeah.
John:
Yeah, it's past time publishers need to start to invest in this newer technology. Again, a DMP largely transacts on a cookie pool, and you have an audience that you create in your DMP. That audience is reflected in a cookie pool that gets matched with another addressable platform. Well, that cookie pool is going to be diminished when third party cookies stopped getting supported in Chrome. So you have to be able to make that audience addressable somehow. So there's any number of solutions that are coming down the pike, you know?
The trade desk is kind of leading the way with the GUID and they have a whole coalition of ecosystem partners that have bought into it. And being able to use that solution fully requires everybody to come to the table with an addressable audience, right? So having a first party relationship with that audience, having PII on these audience members and being able to. Demonstrate you know you've got a relationship with that audience will allow you to be able to take advantage of these new audience targeting solutions that are coming down the pike now
Google is you know they've been kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth for sure, especially around when and if they are going to decommission the third party cookie support. It's going to happen and about six months ago one of their product managers on Google blog mentioned that they aren't inclined to support the kinds of solutions that trade desk is suggesting, but they did say they are going to continue to facilitate those parties that can demonstrate that they have a first party relationship with their audience. And what that means, what I'm predicting is we're going to have a similar situation like we've been doing with, you know, Twitter or LinkedIn and Facebook, where you come to the table with your first party audience with PII and then you'll match it with a Google user graph. And then the resulting overlap between those two will be that addressable audience.
Now you're not going to be able to look into that audience and know exactly who the users are, but you're going to have, you know, pretty good confidence that your audience is being reflected in this overlap audience. This is the agreement that we've had as marketers with the Facebooks and the Linkedin's and the Twitters. It seems to work and I think ultimately, Google was going to have a similar version of that, but again, I just want to highlight it will require that you have that relationship with your audience, so you can't just come to come to them with a, you know, a cookie pool full of, you know, third party cookies from your DMP and be able to match on that. Those days are going to quickly disappear. So yes, this is something that we need to invest in right away. And like I said, it serves all of our needs, right. It allows publishers to actually have rich audiences to be able to offer to their advertisers. It makes it better for the consumer and the user because it's more privacy compliant and they have more of a trust in a relationship, they demonstrated a trust in a relationship with a publisher by giving them PII. So this is going to drive all our goals and. It's certainly a win situation I predict and you know, now's the time to get that process started.
Chirdeep :
Perfect. So. A lot of these publishers, we see that audience have multiple touch points with publishers. So there is of course the web, mobile apps, newsletter subscriptions, comments and reactions and publisher sites, social media, push notifications. There's way too many touch points rights with CDPs, what you're telling us is you create a 360 profile of this user and you would know exactly what they're subscribing to and how you can probably engage them better on their site. What does. It take for a publisher to integrate a CDP into their workflows, into the CMS, or into an DXP that they're using currently.
John:
So it's actually fairly easy. So most CDP's once you buy a software license, I I don't know any that don't run off of a SaaS model. Most of them require either the CDP itself or maybe they have a partner like leverage lab to do an integration of the technology. This makes it very easy to make sure, as a marketer, make sure that everything is in place and when we do an integration, it is driven by use cases. So before we do anything, we work with the publisher to understand exactly what they're intending to use their first party data to, to drive because a lot of decisions that are made in the implementation process have major ramifications later down the road, so being able to address these use cases early means you're going to set up the CDP environment to drive those use cases as efficiently as possible.
And like I said, CDP's are a marketers tool. You know their interfaces and their complexity and their audience. Building tools kind of vary from vendor to vendor, but most of them are friendly enough for marketers to be able to use. And if they aren't right out of the blocks, they can partner with someone like Leverage lab to get them up to speed so they can understand what the processes are, the types of skill sets were required and there's also a lot of like change management that comes comes into play with the CDP because you know usually CDP, you know it gets paid for across multiple department budgets. So there's a lot of owners in there, you know, you know IT and tech and digital and marketing and sales. Everyone's got kind of their finger and the first party data. So it requires the organization to actually. Aligned to the new technology and you know there's generally some growing pains but ultimately it's like once everything's up and running what we see with publishers is you know, we've got a an implementation that is anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks and then during that time you can start to collect a critical mass of audience data. So once the implementations are done, you actually have something to start go out. And create these high value segments on.
So what we do at leverage lab in a parallel path we, train up the sales team to be able to go out and be able to sell these first party data-driven revenue products. You know yeah you know, provide them the use or excuse me of the case studies and you know the sales sheet and then just kind of the sales training to be able to have those converse conversations, new conversations with advertisers. So what we like to see when everything is working together and we're firing on all Pistons is by that six month you're starting to see real revenue from your investment in the CDP. And like I said, it's like it's not just revenue. CDP is good for all the other things that you already do as a publisher, especially around audience development. So almost immediately you can start to you know, personalize experiences with content recommendations and. Being able to, you know, segment your audiences out and dynamics real time. A segments, so you can send them down, you know different journeys and such.
So you know hopefully by the six month you start to see all these things start to ping together and certainly by the end of a, you know a 12 month engagement with our publisher clients generally see like a 6X return on the CDP. Investment so that includes the license fee and also kind of any managed services that leverage labs have. So it's a money making engine to be kind of crass about it and you know as a just a little proof point or some evidence there with our publisher clients leverage labs like we see this tremendous retention. So you know we're 90-95% in terms of retaining customers year in year out. That's because we create with the CDP and leveraging their first party data, we create this, this revenue engine that no one wants to, you know, look for the plug to pull out of the wall.
They're all looking for the accelerator pedal. So this is a great thing for publishers, a great opportunity and kind of now's the time.
Chirdeep :
Perfect 6X return! I think I would jump right into it.
John:
Yeah. Yeah. It it, it, it really makes financial sense and that's not even taking advantage of all the other functionality that the CDP is going to, you know, help you be able to provide your audience and, you know, audience experiences.
Chirdeep :
Right. So a question that we normally get from publishers is that they see news consumption on social media, and every publisher today publishes their news on social media, right? The engagement on social media seems to be far outweighed from the engagement on their own site. Is this something that CPS can help with or can they bring back engagement, much significantly better engagement on the publisher sites itself?
John:
They're going to have to for the kind of survival of Western style democracies. So this is a passion point for me so you know I'm talking to you here in the United States you're in India. These democracies depend on a free exchange of ideas, and the Free Press has been the engine for that for hundreds of years. And where that looks, what that looks like today are new sites and information sites and entertainment sites on the open web. And you know, that is where the free exchange of ideas actually happens and makes for a healthy democracy. We've seen what happens with social media. It can be weaponized with disinformation. So I think this is critical. I don't think it's something that publishers need to do to make themselves viable. I think it's something they need to do to make our entire livelihoods and way of life viable.
So I think they play a critical role in a healthy community. So it's imperative that we figure this. Now, the good news is that things have gotten so bad the last five or six years that I believe, you know, the, the, the general public is a little less enamored with social media and is actually looking for alternatives. And I think the perfect alternative is something that they've trusted forever, which is, you know, the Free Press and, you know, open web delivers that in spades. So the keys are obviously what you have brought up. It's like you need to be able to engage. Users and visitors to your site as well as they are engaged in social media. So you have to give them the kinds of experiences to deliver that value exchange. And the better you're able to do that through leveraging the first party data, the more likely you can encourage this kind of transition back to sites outside of the walled gardens. So I think a lot of market forces are kind of pointed in the right direction and now it is the responsibility of publishers of the open web to get it right this time right. Deliver the value to your audiences and forge those first party relationships with your audiences. You know how to endear yourself to your users.
Because they are looking for, you know, a way to, you know, get all the information and all the entertainment that they've gotten through their social media feeds somewhere else. So I do think it's like they're built-in opportunities right around, you know, article comments and things like that. I think that is where people are going to interact and they're going to have all the same kind of behaviors that they demonstrate in social media. It's going to be at the bottom of an article page going forward, so. I think there are a lot of really great solutions out there. Open Web is one that's really trying to clean up the discourse and get rid of the toxic back and forth that we see on Facebook and the like, and actually get down to a real exchange of ideas. And so I think that the opportunity is really big and the ramifications are huge.
Chirdeep :
Interesting. So I think that's every publisher's goal right now, which is pretty much get the traffic back onto their sites rather than lose them on social media. Having said that, we work with a lot of publishers across the world and we're seeing one pattern emerge amongst a lot of them. We see one pretty significant pattern emerging across the world, which is the move towards reader revenue. I think a lot of publishers are moving, not necessarily away from ad revenue, but they would want to have an alternate source of revenue, right? Ads can only do so much. You can show only so many ads on a 6 inch screen, so you want to engage your audience better and get them to pay for content as well. So how would CDPs help accelerate this shift? How can I understand that you know first party data really well? How can you leverage that to convert some of your free users to? And pay on your site and get a reader revenue going on your site.
John:
Well, I'll go back to that simple example that I gave early on, just knowing whether a visitor is already a subscriber or not is very valuable, valuable information, right. So as somebody comes to the site for the first time and you realize they are first time. A visitor, or they're a return visitor that hasn't chosen to subscribe. You can start to deliver an experience specifically for them to encourage them along a user journey that converts into a subscription. So being able to segment your audience between yes, there are subscribers and know their subscribers is so simple, but most publishers can't even do that, right? So. They provide a kind of, you know, one experience for all kinds of strategies and those are only going to be so successful. So to be able to have multiple strategies designed for specific types of users and opportunities. Will allow you to customize that experience and hopefully kind of grease the rails to converting. So that's one way. And along the way is like, you know, having a CDP and being able to understand who these people are and what motivates them means you can start to give those kinds of experiences to them that will lead to better conversion rates. You know, it's all about making the user experience. As relevant and as valuable as you possibly can. And you can't do that if you don't know anything about the user. So it's and these are simple concepts that publishers can't. Activate on without being able to, you know, leverage that first party data and you know, create known known users so it it makes just about everything more efficient and provides scale beyond what they already have. And Speaking of scale. Imagine if I'm a publisher and I create a high value audience of current subscribers, right?
These are my subscribers and these are the characteristics that this group shares. I can take that information and go out and have really highly informed look alike audience targeting in very cheap open web display inventory to drive that relevant traffic back into your site. So you can increase the scale of your site traffic and only target those users that share the kind of characteristics that your current subscribers have, so you can scale and focus at the same time. I don't know how you'd be able to execute on a strategy like that without a CDP, but I think this is where publishers are really going to be able to leverage the technology and the data to actually drive a very specific and meaningful strategy around subscriptions. And you know, there's all sorts of other kind of half steps with you know, content gating. And metering and the like. All this is facilitated by the more data that you have.
Chirdeep :
Perfect. So I think this answers a lot of questions that a lot of publishers have been asking us about. We need to know a lot more about the audience and bring them down the funnel of showing them the content, get them to engage better and then finally get to the point of paying for content as well. So moving ahead, are there different types of CDP's? If I'm a publisher and I'm looking at implementing a CDP in my publishing house, are there different types of CDP that I need to be aware of? Is there a CDP particularly for media publishing versus one for e-commerce and marketing? And what should I be choosing for something that I'm looking at?
John:
As a publisher, the answer is yes, there are. There is a pretty robust market of solutions out there and if your audience hasn't already, I encourage everyone to go to Gartner to see their CDP quadrant. It's really very enlightening and you can start to understand the four different types of CDP's and I'll get them wrong, but. I'll probably get three out of the four right. So you have and I won't use actual names of solutions because I don't want to show any preference even to even to our partners. I want this to be as straightforward as possible. So there are CDP's that actually concentrate on the data pipes moving data around and these are kind of some of the oldest. CDP's out there because this was one of the very first use cases, being able to bring all your seat at all your data into a single environment so you can start to get your, you know, arms around what you have, right.
So you know, bring in data from your ESP and your events platform and marry online web data with offline data to kind of get. Your arms around or create kind of a universe of your first party data and then there are there are CDP's that do a really good job about tagging, being able to kind of organize all the various assets and opportunities that an audience will interact with and those those CDP's do a better than average job and being able to collect data around that kind of activity and then there are. CDP's that kind of concentrate on being able to activate this audience data.
So this is all about segmentation and then being able to take that audience segment and then apply it to addressable channels. So they have a lot of integrations with execution channels like you know with Google and the trade desk and you know what have you whatever addressable channel might be relevant. To do an advertiser strategy. So those are the three three that I can remember. There's a fourth one that I can't really remember right now more on ETL data conversion and stuff like that. I believe it is and each one of these quadrants, Gartner, quadrants you'll also have kind of specific functionality that will speak to either a vertical or a group of use cases.
So you have a CDP that does a really good job about collecting user behaviors and taking that raw user behavior data. Feed it into machine learning to be able to, you know, create a high value audience segment kind of on the fly. Create predictive audiences where OK, this audience has a greater than average likelihood to do this. Right. You know say their clickers or you know they are more likely to to you know try sign up for content gating which is like the first step to a digital subscription maybe.
So there are CDP's that kind of really focus on being able to collect and leverage that valuable user data and as a publisher that's kind of where we push our clients to kind of understand. All that behavior that consumers are displaying on your sites. That's information. That's data that doesn't exist anywhere else. That behavioral data is specific to you. That is your gold that no one else has. This is your content, your experiences, your environments. No one can replicate that, not even on social media. So being able to leverage that as well as you can is, I think, the key for being viable.
Later down the road, it helps you differentiate yourself by demonstrating it in the kind of addressable audiences that you can create. And it's proprietary data. No one else has that. So it is your, it is your secret sauce for sure. So for publishers, it's we, we say it's all about, you know, being able to collect these user behaviors, be able to do, you know, affinity scoring to understand what are the topics that really resonate with these. Users, you know, a couple of the CDP's that we work with, have things like natural language processing where they can consume content on your site in a way similar to how humans actually consume it.
So you're not like a CRM with the tags on that page. You can understand it's like, oh, they went to this URL and this URL is tagged with these, you know, you know, topic tags and things like that and you kind of piece together. You know what? What motivates them? But some of these CDP's have really sophisticated. Functionality where you can start to make inferences on all that so you get a more of a kind of a you know 360 degree view. What is motivating that that user that goes beyond these are the, these are the pages that they hit right. So we suggest publishers to go to the CDP's that actually help you leverage all that behavioral data that only exists on your site. And then there's some CDP's that, you know, have better user interfaces.
There's some CDP's that you know, require, you know, actually having somebody with the development skills, someone that can run SQL queries and things like that. And then there's some that are kind of more, you know, friendly that you know, an average marketer like myself can use. So the opportunity is kind of wide and varied.
Chirdeep :
Great. Great. John, thanks so much for all of those insights.