Amnet Canada pioneers market first 2nd party data solution

In Canada, automotive and financial services brands are among the most heavily invested categories of programmatic advertising. Unfortunately, other categories like Retail and CPG lag behind further adoption as they are unable to effectively reach their target consumers due to the lack of reliable 3^rd party Canadian data.

To address this industry-wide problem, Amnet Canada developed an agile solution to give its non-automotive clients greater access to reliable data at scale, ultimately helping them achieve incremental reach and frequency across their campaigns.

A key insight was identified that whilst 2^nd party data served as an alternative solution, it is typically fixed to the media owner’s display inventory thus, limiting its applicable reach. The two biggest barriers around leveraging ‘decoupled’ 2^nd party data are (1) the lack of commercial and technical education publishers have to monetize this as a new revenue stream and (2) legal fears and uncertainty regarding a breach of PIPEDA privacy rules.

Subsequently, Amnet Canada turned to autoTRADER.ca. With 12.5 million monthly visits, autoTRADER.ca is the #1 automotive marketplace in Canada where consumers are viewing an average of 15 pages per visit. This equates to an unparalleled mass of data and Canadian consumer insights.

The solution? Amnet Canada and autoTRADER.ca saw the opportunity to pioneer a programmatic strategy that truly leveraged each other’s data capabilities. Rather than buying display banners on autoTRADER.ca, Amnet sought to only buy decoupled 2^nd party data at a fixed CPM rate by way of a DMP-to-DMP connection. As a result, autoTRADER.ca became the first Canadian publisher to directly plug their audience data into Amnet’s DMP. So, if a user appeared on specific autoTRADER.ca webpages or made a specific car model search, Amnet could pull a data mine query across the rest of the internet to reach that same audience segment. For example, regardless of car brand, any models hitting a certain price threshold could be identified and broadly categorized under ‘Luxury’ as a new tactic to drive incremental campaign reach.

The sophistication of this partnership gave Amnet access to autoTRADER.ca’s website taxonomy for offsite activation across its DSPs. What made this approach so ambitious was that it was a market first, empowering two key parties to tap into a unified strategy that addressed each of their objectives.

In terms of execution, appreciation around the legal sensitivities and publisher 1^st party data was vital, which meant the relationship had to be built around responsibility and collaboration. Dutifully, this win-win partnership took 12 months to fully negotiate and activate. Now, at the end of each month, both Amnet and autoTRADER.ca receive an impression report from Amnet’s DMP to summarize the total amount payable for impressions served using autoTRADER.ca’s layered data. Amnet is also constantly monitoring and reviewing the performance of this new data to understand how it compares to other data sets and whether it means better value for its clients.

Lastly, Amnet is now leading the conversation in Canada around decoupled 2^nd party data, using its proven model to educate new publishers on how to monetize this as a new revenue stream.