Covatic Launches Audience Linking Solution

Covatic, developer of a best-in-class, privacy-first, audience targeting solution, has today (August 7th, 2024) announced the launch of its Audience Linking solution, enabling media owners to pool audience cohorts across a range of platforms and digital properties – while respecting user privacy.

Audience Linking by Covatic tackles the challenge of recognising anonymous users across various apps, websites, smart speaker skills, and CTV services in a privacy-secure and scalable way. Media owners can leverage the granular audience knowledge provided by the solution, and deliver a highly addressable and targeted advertising experience. Unlike traditional methods, Audience Linking does not rely on third-party cookies and seamlessly integrates with any form of first party or pan-publisher ID. Moreover, it can operate effectively even in environments where no IDs are present. The encoding or ‘hashing’ system utilised by Audience Linking ensures that all data is secure and cannot be linked back to an identifiable user. This makes it safer than traditional clean rooms, which are susceptible to hacking and data leakage.

Using the solution, first-party identifiers collected by a mobile app, CTV app, Alexa skill, or website are encoded and then passed to the Covatic SDK. The relevant encoded identifiers and audience cohort codes are then sent to a secure Private Audience Matrix hosted by Covatic. At no point does Covatic have access to the raw data or the key—known as a ‘salt’— to decode the data. When a second or third device presents itself to this protected database, all audience cohorts are shared back to all devices with the same ‘hash value,’ in order to link these audiences in a privacy-secure fashion.

For example, a consumer may read a significant number of personal finance articles in a news reader app, and so is placed in a relevant audience cohort. This audience can then be combined with that of a drama-centric CTV app, which might otherwise lack the ability to gather such insights, providing a more comprehensive view and understanding of user habits. Similarly, third-party audiences, including retail media datasets, can be imported, opening up new targeting capabilities.

“Relevancy is key for both media owners and advertisers in today’s privacy-focused landscape. The more intimately a business understands its audience, the more valuable it becomes for everyone involved. Our Audience Linking solution goes beyond basic targeting and provides a pooled view of an anonymous user’s topics of interest across all devices, so our clients can better link an ad to an action,” says Daniel Pike, CPO at Covatic. “We have worked closely with our clients to develop this solution and take pride in delivering this highly effective and sustainable method to reach audiences and boost return on investment for advertisers.”