Global media and marketing services company ENGINE is diving even deeper into technology.
The company expanded its cookieless offering on Wednesday with Device Graph+, which adds more CTV solutions to its existing planning and buying capabilities across mobile, display and online video.
“We’re trying to solve for where the market is headed,” Michael Zacharski, CEO of ENGINE Media Exchange, the company’s programmatic solution. “It just so happened that the future happened a lot faster because of COVID and with everything going on with cookieless.”
The new tool builds on ENGINE’s existing measurement solutions for CTV. ENGINE had already delivered premium direct CTV supply through the ENGINE Media Exchange SSP with data-driven insights, targeting and measurement. Besides powering CTV buying, ENGINE’s Device Graph+ is designed to be flexible and integrate clients’ first- and third-party data, as well as other ad buying platforms.
The tool combines proprietary data from ENGINE Media Exchange and ENGINE’s multiple data partners across automatic content recognition (ACR), cross-device data, location-based attribution partners and identity resolution providers.
The solution differs from others in the market, Zacharski said, because Device Graph+ started as a cookieless tool, as opposed to competing solutions which are being retrofitted to work without cookies.
Of course, CTV operates within an app environment, which is naturally cookieless. So the ENGINE Device Graph+ tool is designed to identify which devices are in the household, enabling targeting and measurement.
“Once we know the device is in the household, we can then to start understand things about the household or individual devices and can also measure against the household and individual devices and attribute,” Zacharski said. “We kind of built a hub where all of these different data signals interconnect. And the basis of that is our SSP, the main hub where we deliver.”
ENGINE also uses ACR data across roughly 15 million households to determine what they’re consuming in both linear and CTV.
These capabilities are unusual for an SSP, Zacharski notes. Typically, these capabilities come from the buy side – the DSP or DMP. But in building these identity resolution capabilities closer to the device, Zacharski claims it “solves for a lot of the complexity” in CTV buying.
ENGINE Insights, he said, also uses surveys and builds look-alike models across the entire population, creating targetable audiences that Device Graph+ can identify in cookieless environments, making the information available to clients such as agencies, DSPs, or trading desks.
