In this blog, we will outline what audience activation is, why it is important for marketers, and how to activate audiences. We’ll discuss how publishers and advertisers can work together to connect data with technology like Google’s Ad Manager, Prebid.org, leading DSPs such as The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP, and major ad platforms like TikTok and Meta for activation purposes. 

What is audience activation and why is it important for marketing?

Audience activation, in the context of advertising, is the process of identifying and targeting a specific audience with relevant content and offers. It is important for marketers to use audience activation because it allows them to reach their target audience more effectively and efficiently. Audience activation can improve marketing campaigns by increasing brand awareness, driving leads, and generating sales.

Marketers today are faced with complex buyer journeys, exacerbated by the loss of third party data and cookie deprecation. To succeed, marketers must move away from the channel-first approach and create unified customer profiles with data from all available channels. With a centralized profile based on first party data, marketers can target audiences with just the right message, at the right time. 

By maximizing partnerships with media partners, marketers can look across consumer touchpoints to increase the effectiveness of activation. Technology can help organizations gain value from advertising partnerships while navigating challenges with data privacy. 

How to activate audiences with connected data 

Data is usually kept in a cloud environment like Snowflake, GCP, AWS or Databricks, and activation technology must be able to work with the data environment safely and with privacy in mind. 

Optable Collaborate is a Data Clean Room solution, fully interoperable across cloud environments. It utilizes leading privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and is purpose-built with advertising-specific frameworks and utilizes a simple pricing & activation model. 

Collaboration is enabled by tools like Optable’s DMP, which creates, segments and analyzes audience data before and after it is utilized within a clean room. Optable DMP provides an easy-to-use interface for commercial teams and plugs into a wide array of data sources, including real-time & event-level data, allowing you to scale & manage the importing, building, activation and measurement of audiences throughout all phases of advertising.

Once data is collated in a privacy-safe way, these are the steps to take to activation:

• Create, segment, and analyze your audience data. This will help you understand who your target audience is and what they are interested in.
• Deep dive into each audience segment. This will allow you to tailor your content and offers to each segment's specific needs.
• Form partnerships with publishers and advertisers. This will give you access to a larger audience and allow you to reach them more effectively.
• Connect your data with key advertising technologies. This will help you track the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize your results.
• Control the security and privacy of your data. This is essential to ensure that your data is used responsibly and ethically.
• Analyze across audience and ad event data. This will help you understand how your campaigns are performing and make necessary adjustments.

Once audiences are activated effectively, with data-informed decisioning, marketing campaigns will become imminently more effective. To find out more, contact us for a demo.