Audigent and NextRoll pioneer privacy-forward audience solutions with the Protected Audience API
At a glance
- Audigent, part of Experian, and NextRoll partnered to pioneer a first-of-its-kind privacy-first audience targeting solution, leveraging the Protected Audience API to activate Audigent’s interest groups on the AdRoll demand-side platform (DSP).
- NextRoll’s existing Privacy Sandbox integration, combined with Audigent’s proactive creation of thousands of interest groups across a potential audience of over one billion browsers, facilitated large-scale testing and enabled a campaign that delivered nearly five million impressions across 42,000 domains.
- This collaboration validated the Protected Audience API’s potential for upper-funnel audience targeting and generated key insights for the industry while maintaining user privacy.
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Unlocking new possibilities through partnership
Audigent recognized the shift in the digital advertising landscape to meet increasing consumer expectations around privacy. As a leading data technology company, they possess a highly technical team and a vast code base spanning millions of websites. Their commitment to advertisers, publishers, and partners drives them to develop and scale impactful solutions. Recognizing Chrome’s role in the ecosystem, Audigent invested in Privacy Sandbox to ensure partners succeed in these new methods for data exchange, audience targeting, and monetization without third-party cookies. Their goal: determine the scale, breadth, and accuracy of data using the Protected Audience API while seeing how that data can transact and monetize across the programmatic ecosystem.
NextRoll, a marketing technology company and early adopter of Privacy Sandbox technologies, shares Audigent’s vision to prioritize consumer privacy and protect independent publishers’ futures. Following their initial tests, NextRoll wanted to expand the utility of their AdRoll platform and unlock new use cases for other industry players like agencies, advertisers, publishers, and audience data providers. This shared goal led to a partnership with Audigent to pioneer a path in privacy-first solutions that isn’t reliant on third-party cookies and leverages the Protected Audience API to support the activation of Audigent’s interest groups on the AdRoll demand-side platform (DSP).
“As an industry, we need to embrace the fact that online advertising is changing, and it's imperative to explore every possible new avenue to help our brand and media agency partners maintain continuity, scalability, and performance around their media buying capabilities. Protected Audience and interest groups certainly open the door for data companies like ours to continue to activate data at scale while championing consumer privacy. We are excited to become the cornerstone data asset for our media buying partners in Privacy Sandbox as well as provide this infrastructure to our data partners.”
A collaborative approach to Protected Audience API testing and validation
Audigent faced a unique challenge when considering the Protected Audience API as a new paradigm for audience targeting: a lack of readily available DSP partners. To validate the core functionality of Interest Group creation and buying, Audigent took the initiative to build a basic, in-house bidding infrastructure. This highlighted their commitment to driving Protected Audience API adoption and establishing a proof of concept.
NextRoll, having already invested in integrating with Privacy Sandbox technologies and building essential components for participation, was ready to dive in and support. Their existing infrastructure allowed them to quickly adapt to the delegation of interest groups, demonstrating the value of early adoption and preparation.
Building the testing framework:
Audigent’s testing focused on achieving scale. They successfully activated over
1,100 interest groups across more than 1.5 billion Chrome browsers, showcasing
their ability to handle large-scale data within the Protected Audience API
framework.
The collaborative testing between Audigent and NextRoll aimed to validate the activation of Audigent’s data through the AdRoll DSP but also unlock which inventory was purchased, how it was priced, and across which exchanges it was traded. This involved connecting browsers to Interest Groups across Audigent’s network of publisher websites and running a two-week campaign delivering nearly five million impressions across 42,000 domains.
However, this integration process was not without its challenges. Audigent encountered limitations including the restricted Interest Group delegation quota, the complexity of the JavaScript API, debugging difficulties, and the short lifespan of Interest Groups. NextRoll had to design around limitations in the number and size of interest groups manageable within the browser.
NextRoll addressed the Interest Group limitations through careful design and planning, and Audigent has actively shared their feedback with the Privacy Sandbox team. Their input, alongside broader ecosystem feedback, contributed to ongoing improvements to the technologies including the expansion of Interest Group lifespan to 90 days.
Results and Learnings
The work between Audigent and NextRoll demonstrates the power of collaboration in advancing the Privacy Sandbox initiative. By combining their respective expertise and resources, they were able to accelerate their testing capabilities and generate valuable insights for the entire advertising industry.
Audigent’s initial testing in March 2024 proved that Interest Group creation is achievable at scale within the Protected Audience API framework. These findings, announced at the IAB Tech Lab, underscored the technology’s potential for large-scale audience targeting and represent an important step in Audigent’s plan to determine the achievable scale for widespread data activation.
Additionally, the joint testing supported the Protected Audience API’s potential for upper-funnel audience targeting. Prior to this, the technology had primarily focused on remarketing. The testing also revealed, as Protected Audience currently functions, a requirement to tailor Interest Group configurations for each advertiser or agency, leading to new recommendations for improving the API being shared with the Privacy Sandbox team. With ongoing improvements, Interest Groups created using data management platform (DMP) data could be effectively activated on DSPs like AdRoll.
Looking ahead, Audigent plans to scale their testing efforts, explore campaign optimization techniques with NextRoll, test CPM variability, and more. NextRoll recognizes the Privacy Sandbox journey is ongoing and much work remains. However, they view their partnership with Audigent as a significant step forward for the industry, emphasizing the importance of continued collaboration and innovation.
“As a long-standing participant in the Privacy Sandbox initiative, NextRoll believes that the Privacy Sandbox’s APIs can be a privacy-preserving alternative to third-party cookies. While there’s still work to be done, this partnership with Audigent marks a significant step forward for the industry.”
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