By: Nathan Thomas, SVP of Data Sales & Strategy at Playwire
Can you introduce yourself and your audience solutions?
I’m Nathan Thomas, SVP of Data Sales & Strategy at Playwire. I have been with Playwire for 15 years, where I have either founded or managed our Yield Ops, Ad Ops, and Publisher Management teams. In addition to those three core teams, I have been deeply involved with anything related to audience data, identity solutions, and data management.
Playwire exclusively represents thousands of online publishers for all their digital sales and data monetization. This includes premium publishers like Redfin.com, Sparknotes.com, and Letterboxd.com. Each publisher uses a host of proprietary Playwire technology and solutions, including but not limited to, our Tag Management Solution, Header Bidding Wrapper, Video Player, CMP, and most relevant for this conversation, our own DMP.
Through our deep partnerships and code on page integrations across all Playwire publisher sites, we are able to collect the most direct, consented, and extensive form of first-party data. Not only can our DMP ingest contextual signals around IAB Content Taxonomy, Meta Data, keywords, URL-level data, Campaign Data and more, we also enable data sharing directly from each publishers’ CRM via extensive data layer integrations into our DMP. The result is data of unprecedented quality, sourced directly from and with the explicit consent and knowledge of our publishers.
When Playwire data is purchased, the origin of the data is always very clear. Real estate data will be powered by publishers like Redfin.com, entertainment data from the likes of Letterboxd.com, student demographic data from publishers like Sparknotes.com as well as extensive gaming and technology data from publishers such as Warcraftlogs.com and Androidauthority.com.
Up until 2023, Playwire data and audience segments were only available for use on media buys sold by Playwire and only on Playwire operated inventory. Thus, I am extremely excited to now offer our phenomenal first-party data and audience segments as a standalone solution in all major DSPs and Social Platforms for immediate activation across Web, Mobile App, CTV and Social Media.
Why have you partnered with Eyeota?
Playwire was looking for a global partner, trusted by data sellers and agencies alike, that can facilitate the roll-out of our advanced audiences. Historically, we’ve been very selective about how our data can be used, never allowing it outside of Playwire inventory and media buys on our publishers. Further, we wanted a partner with the right expertise, industry acumen and accreditations, as well as the necessary integrations across the demand side, and a future proofed suite of products. The adoption of alternative signals and identifiers made us especially confident in choosing Eyeota.
In which markets do you operate?
Playwire is a global company, with offices in both the US and the UK, and employees based all over the world. We are also part of Japan-based Freakout Holdings. We represent our publishers globally for both media and data sales, which is why we are able to offer audience data for most markets in the world.
Can you discuss the importance of audience data in today’s digital advertising landscape?
Reaching the right audience is arguably the most important objective for any advertising campaign. There are a variety of ways to achieve this goal, from simple contextual methods to advanced data driven audience strategies involving authenticated firsty-party client data. If and when audience data is used, the quality and the source of that data becomes of paramount importance.
Most third-party data across the market is simply inaccurate, and often from dubious sources. At Playwire, we pride ourselves not only on the quality sourcing of our data, i.e. our exclusive publishers, but also the way the data is collected. Our proprietary DMP is directly integrated into our publisher tech, which in turn is code on page for every website we work with. This means real estate data will be powered by Redfin.com, movie and TV data by Letterboxd.com, and so forth. Additionally, Playwire has built our DMP from the ground up to be identifier agnostic, supporting a variety of signals, IDs, HEMs, and more.
How can businesses leverage data to improve advertising strategies?
First-party data is undoubtedly the gold standard. However, not every advertiser or brand has access to scaled first-party data, especially small to medium advertisers. Thus, trustworthy external deterministic data is a vital component of any advertising strategy when it comes to reaching the right customer or audience across different verticals and media. Even for advertiser’s who are in the lucky position to have access to scaled first-party data, that is only one singular data point out of many that makes up a whole consumer, their preferences, and interests. Having visibility of one star is great, but having the ability to view the whole constellation is beyond anything one little star could offer. Therefore, adding Playwire data to your media campaigns can vastly improve results and increase the universe of addressable customers.
Reach out to our Audience Specialists at the Data Desk
