How Magnite Match Makes First-Party Data Actionable

With third-party identifiers going away, new paths for activating data have become increasingly important. While clean rooms are a starting place, they still require participants to move personal information. The future of data-sharing will be encrypting data where it sits.

Publishers and brands require a scaled, secure method of matching offline data to a transaction system without requiring them to “give away the farm” and share their proprietary data. 

Magnite’s next-generation platform, Magnite Match, achieves just that. Match supports the onboarding and activation of encrypted personal information. It matches that encrypted data offline, so raw personal identifiers such as emails, phone numbers, or other sensitive information are never shared with Magnite or any other party involved in the match or the ad request.

Match is also interoperable with independent clean rooms and data warehouses, providing ultimate flexibility for buyers and sellers who want to control their data and how it’s used.

Data Activation for Our Privacy-First Era 

With increased regulation around consumer privacy evolving across regions and the decline of third-party cookies, the ad industry is rethinking how it approaches audience targeting and measurement. Meanwhile, as more consumers build relationships directly with brands, be it through an app or site, retailers and publishers seek to unlock the full value of their in-house, first-party data. 

Match meets the moment by safely empowering brands and publishers to unlock the full value of their data. With a built-in activation path, publishers can attach matched data to an ad opportunity and present it directly to a buyer in real-time. 

For example, imagine a new customer signs up for a diaper brand’s Rewards App with their email to earn points for diapers, gift cards, and special sale offers.

The diaper brand has other products that may interest parents with toddlers and wants to advertise their products to the customers on other platforms they visit.

Here, Match enables the diaper brand to match their data with sellers’ to create high-fidelity, pseudonymous identifiers, allowing audience activation without anyone needing to share personal information in the bid stream. So, if the diaper brand wants to run a display ad on a newspaper’s website or run a video ad on a family show, they can use Match to activate their data. Match does the same on the publisher side, amassing a batched list of the publisher’s encrypted login users, so customers can be targeted without conveying their personal information.

Magnite’s pipes provide two paths for activation. With the deal path, a deal is triggered each time a publisher identifier surfaces that’s part of the specified match. With the buyer activation path, an encrypted identifier signifying the existence of a match is conveyed to the advertiser, allowing the diaper brand and the newspaper’s proprietary customer data to stay offline.

How it Works: Best-in-Class MPC Matching Technology 

Magnite uses multi-party compute (MPC) technology and Homomorphic Encryption to support light data matching and activation solutions across our exchanges. 

This cutting-edge technology addresses privacy concerns by only ingesting encrypted data from both parties. It then uses multi-party compute technology to match data and generate synthetic IDs for targeting without exposing the raw personal data to any party involved during the process. MPC tech is a key differentiator in the market because there is no visibility into raw personal information at any stage in the process. 

The Key Benefits of Match

• Security

By requiring each party to encrypt their data with their own encryption key, Match gives brands and publishers the data protection they’re looking for. Encryption keys are unique to each party and are never shared. Magnite does not use the encryption keys ourselves.

• Interoperability

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and clean rooms are emerging means of matching audience data that many publishers already use. For such solutions to truly scale, however, there needs to be greater adoption of the technology to support them. 

Match is compatible with both existing clean rooms and other services that use PETs, all while ensuring personal information stays out of the bid stream. Raw personal information (whether it’s in possession of the first-party data owner or stored in a clean room) never has to move. 

• Focus on Activation 

Currently, ad tech’s approach to identity is fractured: different players have adopted different solutions, with no unified agreement on how to approach targeted addressability. In this splintered environment, understanding consumer behavior is no small task. Match’s ability to match users across attributes and then activate against a matched set provides a holistic and deterministic look at audiences, improving addressability and campaign outcomes.

As we move toward a more privacy-first future, the industry needs solutions that are secure, interoperable, and high fidelity. Magnite’s Match technology is paving the way for brands and publishers to activate their own first-party data on their own terms and unlock greater value for their content.