Rich signals, day one.

What teams actually need from an audience platform is simple: usable data. Ideally trusted and reliable.

Not in a few weeks. Not when integrations are built and tested. Immediately. 

Because until you have enough signal to build and activate audiences, the platform isn’t doing much for you.

We’re closing that gap today with Optable Attributes. A collection of enrichment capabilities so you can start building rich audience segments from day one.

Optable Attributes is:

• Audience intelligence: Instant access to a catalog of high-quality consumer signals sourced from Optable 3rd-party data partners.
• Contextual intelligence: AI-driven content classification transforms page content into meaningful interest and intent segments.
• Ad intelligence: Real-time capture of ad delivery and auction signals to build audiences from real intent and actual value.

All delivered in a single package for one flat-rate fee.

It's what turns your identity graph into an audience engine, without the operational and cost overhead.

Audience intelligence

Start with a complete picture of your visitor

Your 1st party data may tell you who someone is, but it rarely captures the full picture of how they behave, what they buy, or what they’re likely to do next.

Audience Intelligence extends that view with a turnkey 3rd-party dataset available directly inside Optable. No need to source, clean, or integrate external data. It’s already structured and ready to activate.

This dataset includes multiple signal types, spanning:

• Transactional behavior and purchase patterns
• Spending power and propensity indicators
• Brand affinities and retail activity
• Lifestyle and interest-based signals
• Motivational and intent-based attributes

The result is a stronger foundation for both planning and monetization. Teams can move quickly from raw identity to defined, sellable segments like:

• “High-value retail spenders”
• “Auto intenders with recent purchase signals”
• “Travel-ready audiences with strong booking propensity”

Traditionally, this level of enrichment requires multiple providers, each with separate contracts and CPM-based pricing. Here, it’s delivered as a single integrated dataset under a flat rate, so usage isn’t tied to cost.

Contextual intelligence

Turn content into clear, reliable signals

Contextual data is often treated as a shortcut to intent, but most systems still rely on keywords and URL patterns. That approach misses nuance.

Optable Contextual Intelligence uses LLM-driven analysis to evaluate full page content and classify it based on meaning. Our semantic engine reads the content itself, not just metadata, and maps that understanding to standardized taxonomies.

From there, it:

• Classifies content into IAB Content Taxonomy 3.1
• Extracts topics, entities, and intent signals
• Applies consistent categorization across content
• Links those signals directly to user identity

Instead of tagging pages in isolation, this builds a persistent view of what each user actually engages with over time.

That makes contextual data far more actionable. You can define audiences based on consistent behavior, not single page visits, and apply those insights directly to packaging and targeting.

It also removes operational overhead. There’s no manual tagging, syncing across vendors, and separate contextual systems to manage. The classification happens automatically and feeds directly into audience creation.

Ad intelligence

Use real buyer behavior as your strongest signal

Content suggests intent. Auction data shows how that intent is valued.

Most teams treat Prebid and GAM data as reporting, but it actually reveals something far more useful: How the market values your audience.

Optable captures these real-time signals including:

• Impressions, clicks, and viewability
• Bids, CPMs, and bidders
• Advertiser names, deal IDs, and bidding patterns

Once structured and tied directly to user records in the platform, this data becomes a valuable building blocks for segmentation.

You can build audiences such as:

• Brand loyalists: Users consistently targeted by a specific advertiser
• Vertical intent groups: Users bid on across a category like auto, travel, or finance
• High-value users: Users who consistently attract higher CPMs

These are demand-validated signals, reflecting what buyers are actually willing to spend against.

That opens up more direct ways to act on the data, from packaging PMP deals backed by bidder demand to identifying competitive targeting opportunities and building lookalike seeds from winning bids.

Instead of inferring intent, you’re working from observed market behavior.

Why our model is different

Most teams rely on a combination of point solutions to achieve anything close, namely:

• 3rd party data providers charging CPM-based fees
• A separate contextual vendor with CPM-based fees
• Internal tools or add-ons for auction analysis

Each solution has its own pricing model, integration requirements, and workflows. Bringing them together requires ongoing maintenance, with increasing cost and complexity as you scale.

Optable Attributes consolidates these capabilities into a single solution with:

• One system
• One workflow
• One flat-rate

Publishers and agencies get faster access to valuable signals, fewer dependencies across vendors, and a cost structure that doesn’t scale with volume.

The takeaway

Most platforms make you wait for your data to become useful. You deploy, collect signals, and gradually build toward something you can eventually activate.

Optable Attributes skips the cold start. You start with enrichment baked in across audience, contextual, and ad intelligence. So you can move directly into building, packaging, and activating differentiated audiences without delay.

At the same time, the economics are simpler. Instead of layering multiple vendors and CPM-based costs, you get a single system with predictable pricing and fewer moving parts.

And if you already have trusted vendors in place, Optable Attributes works alongside them, extending your current setup with additional signal and functionality. 

Accelerating the path from signal to revenue, with less friction along the way.

Getting started

Optable Attributes is available now. If you are an existing Optable customer, speak with your account team about Optable Attributes today. Or to learn more, let's chat.

At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25, publishing decision-makers gathered to discuss the industry's most pressing challenges. Three days, three themes: organizational transformation, monetization in the post-search era, and the new economics of influence.

But throughout the summit, there was a common undercurrent: the industry has shifted, and the old playbook no longer applies.

Here's what we learned.

The Traffic Problem Is an Identity Problem

The theme of traffic decline and its impact carried over all three days of the event.

• Publishers have been dependent on search traffic to drive registrations, memberships, and ad revenue. 
• AI results, algorithm updates, and platform volatility have all contributed to the erosion of search traffic.
• Declining traffic means fewer known users, which means a shrinking addressable audience for advertisers and subscription conversion.
• Publishers have to rethink their value proposition; users can find quick answers elsewhere, so publishers need to not only attract new visitors but give existing ones a reason to stick around.

The reality: Publishers who have been building identity infrastructure independent of traffic source are in the best position for every session to become an asset.

Subscriptions Work, But They’re Not for Everyone

The urgency around subscriptions dominated Day 1, but not without candid discussions about how challenging the pivot can be.

• Converting to a subscription model is a challenge and lengthy process that can risk hedging out loyal audiences.
• Most publishers cannot realistically compete with or achieve the same success as the NYT and WSJ in subscription wallet share.
• Social and off-platform audience building emerged as a parallel, which will require cross-channel attribution.

The underlying tension: Ad revenue and subscription revenue don't always play nicely. Paywalling content risks removing it from programmatic monetization.

AI Presents New Pressure and Opportunities

AI has moved beyond a buzzword, appearing across conversations as a challenge as well as a competitive tool.

• AI-generated answers capture search referral traffic at the top of the funnel.
• Unauthorized AI bots are crawling sites en masse, contributing to site downtime while attempting to monetize the information they’re ingesting.
• According to MuckRack’s State of Journalism 2026 report, 82% of journalists are using AI tools, and publishers are building editorial workflows with AI.

The opportunity: AI is forcing publishers to rethink content creation and distribution practices. But the same disruptive technology is also giving lean teams new tools to package audiences, respond to briefs, and unlock revenue that manual workflows couldn't reach.

The Monetization Gap is Widening, But the Toolkit is, Too

Day 2's monetization track fostered actionable conversations.

• Off-platform revenue is growing to complement on-site programmatic.
• Advertisers are consolidating spend into programmatic direct and PMPs, demanding precise audiences and proof of outcomes. This shift will reward publishers with strong first-party data infrastructure.
• Curation is gaining traction as publishers seek to reclaim control over how their inventory is packaged and sold.
• Agentic audience building and RFP response creation are starting to close the operational gap for smaller teams.

The consensus: Diversification isn't optional, but it requires the right technology and organizational readiness.

Where Do Publishers Go From Here?

The Digiday Publishing Summit made one thing clear: publishers are very aware of the challenges they’re facing, and they’re actively looking for answers. What they're short on is time, bandwidth, and the right infrastructure to act.

We’ll be publishing a series of posts going deeper into the practical paths forward on each of these themes, covering agentic audience monetization, AI-powered sales workflows, omnichannel diversification, and more.

Thank you to everyone who braved the winter storm to join us for Optable Connect in Toronto. While some of you were delayed or homebound due to weather, we’re so grateful for the amount of interest in our event and the future of AdTech.

Across the board, the theme of this year’s event is transformative: AI is here to stay, and the age of agentic advertising is already upon us.

We learned through live demos, active panel discussions, and a fireside chat that the industry continues to adapt alongside new and emerging technologies — and the companies evolving with agent-ready data, AI-powered strategies, and a collaborative mindset are the ones most likely to succeed.

For now, we’re sharing the highlights, key concepts, and action items from Optable Connect 2026 to empower your teams and activate your data.

The Big Picture: Agentic Infrastructure + AI Readiness

Optable’s CEO, Vlad Stesin, opened by honing in on the ongoing disruption and transformation of the media landscape. He discussed how, as AI evolves, challenges like privacy and fragmentation across tools and data become more apparent.

While AI presents new obstacles for publishers, platforms, advertisers, and agencies to overcome, it also poses unique opportunities for collaboration. To make the most of the agentic, AI-powered era we’re entering, media buyers and sellers can work together to activate engaged audiences outside of walled gardens, creating a future of targeted, data-driven advertising. 

We welcomed representatives from all parts of the ecosystem to share their thoughts and learn from one another. Over the course of the day, we heard new perspectives and actionable insights for the agentic advertising era that publishers, advertisers, agencies, and media companies need to know.

If you missed out on the live event, you’re in the right place. We’ll walk through the highlights from every session and tie it all together at the end.

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1. From RFP to Activation: A Deep Dive into Agentic Advertising with Live Demo

To kick things off, Bosko Milekic, Co-Founder & CPO of Optable, helped us get familiar with the growing applications of agentic AI in audience planning as the demand for PMP increases.

He discussed how manually planning campaigns is slow, fragmented, and tedious. With varied or incomplete publisher data, a lengthy proposal process, and the risk of user error, responding to an RFP the old-fashioned way takes too much time for inconsistent results.

But that all stands to change when you integrate AI agents into your workflow.

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Bosko reintroduced us to Optable’s Audience Agent, previously named the Planner Agent — an agentic tool built to sift through your structured data, uncover new audiences, and simplify the proposal process so you can activate audiences faster and more effectively. With a quick demo, Bosko showed how quick and easy it is to prompt the agent, generate relevant insights, and draft an RPF response using the data in the Optable platform.

He brought his presentation home by debuting Optable’s Sales Agent (in beta) and offering a bold proposition: a future of agent-to-agent (A2A) collaboration between publishers and advertisers. Optable is working towards facilitating an agentic marketplace, automating the media selling process while enriching audience data for more optimized revenue generation.

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2. Agentic Advertising Perspectives: How Can Agentic Build On and Enhance Our Existing Infrastructure?

Moderator: Vlad Stesin (Optable)

Speakers: Pierre-Luc Hardy (Triton Digital), Sonia Carreno (IAB Canada), Alex Gardner (Index Exchange), Scott Menzer (Unity)

This discussion dove into the applications of agentic AI in programmatic advertising, expanding on themes of:

• Industry alignment: It’s not enough for AI to keep advancing. The industry needs to collaborate and agree on AI standards and practices to improve results, preserve data privacy, and maintain transparency.
• Interoperability before automation: Agent-ready data and infrastructure need to come first to ensure a smooth transition to agentic use applications and, ultimately, agent-to-agent transactions.
• Human oversight: There are clear benefits to automating workflows, but at the end of the day, human buyers have the experience and expertise to know best.

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3. Signals + AI = Intelligence: How Publishers Are Updating Their Audience Strategy in the Age of AI

Moderator: Patrick Viau (Optable)

Speakers: Geoffrey Bernard (LaPresse), Julie Kerr (CBC), David Lundell (Hearst), Scott Bender (Newton Research)

Our guests put AI in context for publishers on the front lines, exploring what it actually takes to compete in an AI-driven advertising world. Themes included:

• Foundation before automation: AI-readiness requires a clear data infrastructure, solid identity strategy, and clean first-party signals. Publishers without that foundation will struggle to make the most of AI tools.
• Competing with walled gardens: Publishers with AI-ready data can continue offering advertisers trust and transparency and provide advanced targeting and measurement to better rival the appeal of walled gardens.
• People alongside data: Empowering revenue and operations teams with the right AI tools before implementing new technology is what drives real impact.

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4. Fireside Chat: The Importance of Data in the AI Age

Host: Vlad Stesin (Optable)

Guest: Benjamin Webb (Above Data)

In this interlude, Vlad and Ben started by soft-launching a partnership between Optable and Above Data. They spent their conversation emphasizing what it means to have AI-ready data and what publishers and platforms need to prioritize before adopting agentic AI. They covered: 

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• Advertiser appeal: With agentic AI, publishers can enrich their first-party data and deal directly with advertisers, offering an attractive alternative to saturated walled gardens.
• Data preparedness: AI-ready data needs to be structured, enriched, standardized, and queryable by agents. Data that doesn’t meet these criteria will only impede performance.

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5. How Will AI-Powered Solutions Change Media Buying in 2026?

Moderator: Vlad Stesin (Optable)

Speakers: Alex Feldman (Havas), Andrea Kwiatek (Goodway Group), Adiela Aviram (Manulife)

The final panel of the day brought a candid demand-side perspective covering where agencies and advertisers are in their AI journeys and what it will take to move forward with confidence and profitable results. They covered themes like:

• Urgent standardization gap: Publishers and platforms need to agree on AI standards for the tools to work efficiently and effectively across the entire ecosystem. The production of disparate tools creates fragmentation before the industry can develop frameworks.
• AI needs human oversight: Human expertise should continue informing and reviewing AI workflows. Automating everything with no oversight will create new problems.
• Garbage in, garbage out: Data quality directly impacts results. Panelists agreed that partners need to be upfront about their data limitations or polish their data beforehand.

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Key Takeaways

Throughout the day, recurring themes emerged, allowing us to pinpoint what is top of mind for industry experts:

1. Agentic advertising is already here: It’s not an upcoming trend. Agencies are using AI agents to plan, execute, and iterate on campaigns. Publishers are adopting agentic AI for identity management and audience creation.
2. Your data needs to be AI-ready: Structured, enriched, and organized data is essential for agentic AI to perform accurately and efficiently. AI readiness is a prerequisite if you want to take advantage of agentic workflows.
3. Standards and interoperability aren't optional: Multiple AI frameworks are emerging, and the industry needs to align on how they work together to mitigate fragmentation. 
4. Human oversight is essential: Publishers and advertisers know best; while agentic AI can speed up timelines and make use of existing data, the AI can inadvertently cause other issues. Monitoring AI output should continue for quality assurance.
5. You can compete with walled gardens: Major platforms like Meta and Google are oversaturated. Agentic opportunities could allow AI-ready publishers to gain a critical advantage with unique first-party data, engaged audiences, and streamlined sales.

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What’s Next

The foundation for agentic advertising needs to be built now, not later.

For the industry at large, the urgency centers around agreeing on standards like AdCP and IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Roadmap, and the window to get ahead of fragmentation is getting smaller. For organizations ready to move forward, it’s time to audit your data readiness, identify use cases to test, and put structures in place so you can scale confidently.

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As for the Optable team, we’re here to help publishers and their partners succeed in the agentic era by making data, AI, and standards work together in practice so they can monetize more effectively with the tools — and data — at their disposal.

• We'll continue investing in the data infrastructure and identity foundations that make agentic advertising possible.
• We'll keep building toward agent-to-agent collaboration and seamless cross-system buying workflows by building upon the Audience Agent's ability to surface audiences and draft proposals.

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If you joined us in Toronto, thank you for the enthusiasm and candid discussions. If you couldn't make it, we hope this recap gets you up to speed — and we'd love to keep the conversation going at our event in New York City later this year.

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Prior to the digital age, marketers who invested in paid media strategies were oftentimes very “data poor.” The market was very reliant on traditional research methods, which relied on panel-based data that lacked a lot of granularity & speed. As a result, the value of media, especially across partners or channels, was hard to determine. Traditional research methods still exist today, and are important part of any marketers strategy, but now we exist in a world where there is a plethora of granular digital data that can drastically help us better understand who our customers are, where are the best places to reach them, and how can we persuade them to transact. This is where the newly introduced Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) can shine. Imagine marketers being able to explore rich audience definitions, browse contextual signals aligned with targets, or request custom audience packages from the world’s leading digital publishers all before actually setting up a campaign.

The use of most granular digital data faces one fundamental challenge. For most marketers the primary method for accessing and utilizing this data has been through participating in impression-based auctions. In most digital environments this is done through programmatic advertising, which by some estimates makes up 96% of digital advertising. This is also true for major platforms such as Meta and Google who have dominated digital advertising over the last decade.

The challenge with this dynamic is that it makes it extremely hard to truly value media. For example, a marketer wanting to reach “frequent grocery shoppers in the Northeast” must currently bid blind into auctions for impressions or use opaque 3rd party data, instead of querying sellers for their specific first party segments, retail signals, or custom packages beforehand. Marketers oftentimes have to participate in the media buying process before really gaining access to any insights which ties the customer segmentation & planning process too closely to media activation and removes a key part of the process. As a result, many marketers have become “addicted” to the free insights given by these major platforms or struggle to navigate the complexities of developing an impression-bidding strategy that can help them effectively value the plethora of data across the rest of the digital ecosystem.

However, this is changing and the driving factor is the birth of agentic advertising, powered by AI-infrastructure like LLMs and MCP servers. More specifically, a recently developed protocol call for agentic advertising, AdCP was recently introduced to help both media buyers and advertisers enhance their existing programmatic strategies through the use of AI and bring a new wave of innovation into the programmatic ecosystem. This protocol promises to act as a “universal API” for the advertising ecosystem and we see it helping to advance the already strong foundation built by standards such as OpenRTB, Prebid, and others. In the future marketers will be able to “ask” for what they want across our entire ecosystem (e.g. “I need to reach shoppers of EV vehicles who are in-market and have a household income over X”) and publishers and media sellers can respond with segments, packages, or outcomes they can deliver.

AdCP is well positioned to help solve the “everything, everywhere, all at once” problem facing many modern marketers. It is often challenging for marketers to truly leverage the rich digital data sets of their media partners because they are too complex to utilize through the 100ms auction process. This simplicity is what has allowed platforms like Meta and Google to capture the majority of digital advertising growth.

AdCP creates value through collaborative insights and ad product discovery between marketers and their media partners. AI is uniquely suited to support this process, enabling marketers to work with dozens or even hundreds of media sellers, parse their very different digital data sets and ad product catalogs, and find the right partners to not only build a media plan but also share insights that enhance their overall understanding of their customers. This approach, known as Agentic Collaboration, allows AI agents to scale campaign activity across the ecosystem on tasks such as identifying “audiences who showed purchase intent for home improvement products in the last 30 days” to sourcing “all available high-impact placements around basketball content during Q4”.

The future points to deeper collaboration between existing programmatic companies and emerging agentic advertising solutions to create more effective ad products. The industry has not seen a wave of innovation quite like the one driven by AI and agentic advertising in many years, and progress across dozens of companies is already demonstrating the potential to deliver stronger results for brands and agencies.

Original publication source and date Dec 11, 2025: https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2025-12-auctions-agents

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The shift toward first-party data, privacy-by-design systems, and interoperable identity frameworks has reshaped what publishers need from their data infrastructure. Most publishers now face a familiar challenge: they capture audience interactions across web and app environments, but the underlying signals are shallow, inconsistent, or difficult to activate in meaningful ways. Traditional DMPs and the remnants of cookie-based targeting aren’t enough to support modern audience strategy.

This is the gap Merkury fills.

Built by Dentsu Canada and powered by Optable’s clean-room technology, Merkury offers a scalable, privacy-compliant identity enrichment layer that plugs securely into a publisher’s existing ID graph. It is built on a market-specific identity dataset designed for the needs and nuances of Canadian audiences and is available in three tiers: a free “Flash” tier for exploration and overlap insights, a full-featured tier for enrichment and activation, and an enterprise tier for publishers who need continuous, high-volume identity resolution.

The Foundation: Understanding Canadians

Merkury’s dataset isn’t licensed, purchased, or inferred from a smattering of digital sources. It’s built on the largest agency-operated consumer benchmark available: Dentsu’s CCS. For over a decade, primary research on about 20,000 Canadians annually across more than 10,000 attributes has given insight into psychological drivers, decision-making patterns, media consumption, and lifestyle factors that basic signal or transactional data simply can’t capture. From this foundation, Merkury models identity enrichment across 600,000 unique postal codes, giving publishers granular audience understanding at scale.

How Merkury Works

1. Data Ingestion and Identity Resolution

Publishers typically start with fragmented identifiers—hashed emails, mobile IDs, login events, contextual signals, and first-party behavioral data. Merkury ingests these identifiers into Optable’s clean room, where they can be matched against Dentsu’s CCS-derived dataset to create a more complete, privacy-safe identity foundation.

For publishers with large amounts of anonymous traffic, the enterprise “Merkury-as-a-source” tier provides additional value by helping resolve more of that unaddressed audience and incorporating those identities into their own graph for future activation and monetization.

2. Attribute Enrichment

Once identity resolution is established, Dentsu’s Merkury dataset provides access to high-quality behavioral attributes that deepen publishers’ understanding of their audiences. Teams can enrich their internal profiles with traits such as:

• Psychological factors and behavioural drivers
  Media consumption patterns and behaviour
• Decision-making styles and mindsets
• Personal passions, lifestyle, and values
  
  

This enrichment transforms partially known users into meaningful audience profiles ready for segmentation, personalization, and monetization.

3. Seamless Collaboration

Optable’s clean room serves as the backbone of the collaboration layer, allowing publishers to:

• Collaborate with your partner advertisers or other Dentsu or Optable clients
• Support secure audience matching and overlap analysis
• Enhance audience profiles with advertiser-provided traits
• Enable lookalike modelling and reach extension
• Activate high-value, consented audiences
  
  

Merkury also benefits from Optable’s multi-partner management capabilities, making it easier to collaborate across many relationships within a single, streamlined environment.

4. Activation Across Channels

Once enriched, audiences can be activated across a buyer’s preferred channels through Optable’s integrations or Dentsu’s media ecosystem. Key activation paths include:

• Real-time activation to DSPs such as The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and Google DV360
• Activation to social platforms including Meta, TikTok, and X
• Activation through publisher ad-serving infrastructure like Google Ad Manager and Prebid
  
  

Merkury Key Values for Publishers

• Operational Simplicity: Rather than building enrichment, privacy, and activation layers independently, publishers can rely on Optable’s standardized clean-room pipeline for a faster, more efficient path to scale.
• Future-Proofing Against Signal Loss:
  
  • A deterministic identity anchored in their own data
  • Enriched profiles that don’t rely on external cookies
  • Durable cross-channel addressability
  • Audience data grounded in primary Canadian research, not modelled proxies or imported datasets 
• Improved Advertiser Alignment: Merkury provides a shared identity structure and a collaborative clean-room environment, making it easier to align with advertiser needs and accelerate campaign setup.

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A Modern Identity Infrastructure for Growth

The Dentsu x Optable partnership helps publishers extend the value of the identity data they already own. By combining Dentsu’s decades of understanding Canadians with Optable’s privacy-first collaboration layer, publishers can broaden their audience understanding, strengthen advertiser relationships, and enhance the value of every impression they sell.

Across its three Canadian tiers: exploration, full activation, and enterprise identity resolution, Merkury gives publishers the flexibility to grow at the pace their strategy demands. In a market where every signal counts, Merkury provides a stronger, more complete identity framework to build on.

Contact us at sales@optable.co to learn more about how Merkury can upgrade your data and audience strategy.

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This article mentions findings from the State of Audience Data Monetization 2025 report, in partnership with Digiday. To explore all the survey results and insights, download the full report here→

For years, the industry operated on a simple premise: great content brings audiences, and audiences bring ad dollars. That's still true, but it's no longer enough. Advertisers aren't just buying reach anymore. They're asking harder questions: Who exactly are we reaching? What can you prove about performance? How do we know this is working?

Publishers who can't answer those questions are losing ground. Publishers who can, are building something more durable: direct relationships with advertisers, rooted in shared data and verified outcomes.

This is where data collaboration enters the picture—not as an innovation initiative, but as core infrastructure. Here's why it's becoming the foundation of audience monetization for leading publishers.

Advertisers Want Proof, Not Just Promises

Marketers today expect more than reach. They expect results.

Clean room–enabled data collaboration allows publishers to show exactly who they're reaching, how campaigns are performing, and what revenue outcomes they're driving. Instead of passively offering inventory, publishers who embrace collaboration can build custom audience segments with advertisers, activate campaigns using overlapped data, and measure performance together, securely and in real-time.

This closed-loop model is already familiar to platforms like Meta and Google. Now it's within reach for publishers. And they're moving quickly: 64% of publishers say they are already collaborating with advertisers via clean rooms for campaign planning and measurement.

The use cases reflect a clear focus on accountability, publishers are prioritizing attribution and measurement, high-value audience creation, and privacy-safe data licensing as their primary collaboration goals.

Direct Sales Is Evolving—Not Disappearing

There's a misconception that programmatic has fully overtaken direct sales. In reality, direct-sold advertising remains essential, especially when enriched with collaboration.

Yes, in 2025, 81% of publishers expected programmatic revenue to grow this year, while 73% expected direct-sold revenue to hold steady. But the two don't have to compete. Data collaboration enhances both, and it's particularly powerful for direct sales, giving teams more valuable, data-rich packages to bring to market.

When publishers can match first-party data with advertiser inputs in clean rooms, they unlock premium inventory deals rooted in verified insights, tailored audience segments that command higher CPMs, and stronger buyer relationships built on transparency and shared performance metrics.

The publishers gaining ground are the ones going to key advertisers, building custom plans from shared audience data, and running campaigns with closed-loop measurement. It's the same playbook the major platforms use—now accessible to publishers willing to invest in the infrastructure.

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The Infrastructure Is Finally Publisher-Ready

Legacy clean rooms were technical, isolated, slow, and built for platform-scale players. That's changed drastically.

Publishers are investing heavily in the foundational layer that makes collaboration possible. 78% are either actively using or building an identity graph, and nearly all agree that integrating with demand partners' alternative ID frameworks is essential to their monetization strategy.

Optable enables this shift with code-free setup and audience matching, secure policy-governed collaboration across partners, fast integration with DSPs, SSPs, and ad servers, and real-time activation across environments—from web to CTV.

This means even mid-sized publisher teams can operate with the precision and agility once reserved for walled gardens.

Data Collaboration Isn't Optional Anymore

82% of publishers now say data collaboration is important or mission-critical to their monetization strategy.

That's not a trend, it's a structural shift in how publisher revenue gets built.

The monetization strategies that will thrive in a cookieless, privacy-centric world are the ones built on secure collaboration, direct advertiser relationships, and future-proof infrastructure.

Optable gives publishers the tools to activate first-party data with control and compliance, unlock premium direct deals through shared insights, and scale partnerships with agent-to-agent automation.

Want to see how it could work for your team?
Reach out to our team to book a personalized walkthrough or see a demo of Optable in action. Contact our experts now or email sales@optable.co to start the conversation.

Revenue, Reach, Resilience: Identity Strategy is a Top Priority for Publishers

The digital advertising landscape is undergoing seismic change, driven by a profound shift toward a privacy-first internet. With the deprecation of third-party cookies, the decreasing utility of mobile advertising IDs, and new privacy features that can reduce the precision of a user's IP address, the traditional foundation of audience targeting is completely transforming.

In addition, traditional identifiers that once enabled seamless cross-channel audience targeting are diminishing. Global privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, new browser technologies that actively limit cross-site tracking, and the expansion of device use are leaving publishers with fragmented data and growing signal loss.

74% of publishers and media networks are still heavily reliant on third-party cookies and shared identifiers to deliver on their monetization strategies.
Optable | Digiday Report

To succeed in this new ecosystem, publishers must fundamentally redefine addressability, creating direct connections with audiences, emphasizing trust, and ensuring data security.  

Publishers and media owners who build strong, future-proof identity strategies rooted in first-party data, consent-driven strategies, and technologies that scale with privacy regulations will emerge as leaders. 

Key drivers for adopting a comprehensive identity strategy include: 

• Crafting a robust first-party and authentication strategy
• Deploying an identity foundation that supports new value-generating opportunities
• Supporting multiple identity providers to ensure maximum coverage
• Adopting tools that offer flexible data controls and transparency to adhere to privacy rules and regulations 

Identity management is a strategic imperative that plays a key role in determining a publisher's revenue, reach, and long-term competitiveness. Ensuring that their identity strategy is equally effective, efficient, and compliant is crucial for publishers to sustain audience monetization and advertiser trust.

Lay the Foundation for Identity Management Success

For publishers, a first-party identity graph is the central map for understanding their audience, tying together all the scattered information a user generates across the web. When someone visits a site on their phone, then their desktop, and later signs up for an email, they create multiple, isolated data points. The essential job of the graph is to perform identity resolution, a continuous process of matching and linking all those separate bits of data together. This creates a single, complete profile for that individual or household, giving the publisher a unified view of who the user is and what they do.

Building and owning this identity graph is crucial because it gives publishers full control over their audience data, reducing dependency on external signals. The identity graph becomes the central hub for managing and expanding first-party data, allowing publishers to strategically determine data sources, control privacy, and enrich the data with industry partners.

Crucially, leveraging an owned graph that’s flexible and extensible helps protect the business against programmatic changes. By resolving identities across all touchpoints, the graph maximizes addressable audiences and improves targeting accuracy, which ultimately strengthens the overall revenue strategy across both direct sales and programmatic channels.

To successfully implement a flexible identity foundation, publishers must start with strategic alignment across all teams and clear business goals. Successful organizations avoid siloing identity projects, recognizing they touch every corner of the business, from ad operations and data teams to legal stakeholders. This cross-functional approach ensures the identity graph is tied to measurable objectives and provides the strongest foundation for controlled addressability and revenue growth.

Key steps include:

• Forming a cross-functional workgroup to oversee requirements gathering, use case prioritization, and execution
• Developing well-defined, measurable KPIs (e.g., eCPM lift, match rate improvement, and time-to-integration of new sources) that are correlated with clear tracking methodologies to ensure progress and accountability
• Aligning with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA to build user trust and ensure compliance

By treating identity as a company-wide initiative, publishers establish the operational foundation for scalable, compliant, and effective strategies.

Choose the Right Data and Technology Partners to Maximize Value

For publishers, the true power of an identity graph lies in the quality and depth of the data fueling it. To enhance audience insights, optimize monetization strategies, and deliver better advertising outcomes, choosing the right data and technology partners is critical, ensuring the resulting system is scalable and can help with compliance. 

Different types of partners help publishers maximize audience value by:

• Extending the reach and accuracy of a publisher’s identity graph by linking additional identifiers, such as universal IDs, hashed emails, or deterministic and probabilistic matching solutions. Identity enrichment partners help bridge identity gaps across devices and platforms, ensuring seamless audience recognition in both authenticated and anonymous environments.
• Offering demographic, behavioral, and interest-based data to complement first-party signals. Audience attribute enrichment partners (third-party data providers) enable deeper audience segmentation, allowing publishers to create more relevant and engaging ad experiences to be sold directly to their advertising partners.
• Helping publishers to elevate the quality and relevance of their ad inventory through enhanced audience attributes and refined segmentation. Audience curation partners often utilize advanced algorithms and expert oversight to curate premium inventory for advertising. 
• Providing essential insights that enable publishers to understand the effectiveness of their advertising strategies and share those results with advertising partners. Measurement partners offer unique data sets and analytics capabilities that can help publishers prove the ROI of their advertising campaigns. 

Best Practice
When testing multiple identity enrichment partners, establish a well-structured control group to measure incremental value accurately. Test partners one at a time to isolate their impact, or if testing with overlap such as 95/5, ensure your control group excludes enriched data from all providers. This approach prevents data duplication and gives a clearer picture of each partner’s unique contribution to audience reach and performance.

Unlock New Revenue Opportunities with Identity Graphs

Once a publisher’s identity graph is in place, it becomes a strategic asset that unlocks new monetization opportunities, enhances ad targeting, and strengthens publisher-advertiser relationships to drive revenue. By identifying use cases that maximize return on investment, publishers can transform their identity foundation into a competitive advantage, increasing bid values, improving addressability, and unlocking new revenue streams.

Leading publishers define high-ROI use cases and build their identity strategy around them. By clearly defining ROI-focused use cases, publishers avoid spreading resources thin and maximize the business impact of identity initiatives. Use cases that can unleash effective data monetization strategies include programmatic monetization and direct ad sales.

Examples of programmatic monetization include:

• Signal enrichment: Publishers can grow programmatic by adding valuable signals such as contextual metadata, user behavior, first-party insights, and data provenance to bid requests. This enables advertisers to target trusted audiences more precisely, increasing bid values and competition for inventory.
• Audience curation: Publishers can collaborate with data providers, agencies, or supply-side platforms (SSPs) to create premium, high-value inventory segments across multiple publisher-operated domains. These curated deals offer advertisers exclusive, high-performing inventory with enhanced targeting and measurement capabilities.
• Data marketplace monetization: Publishers can generate additional revenue by packaging and selling anonymized audience segments or contextual data through data marketplaces. Advertisers use this high-quality, privacy-compliant data to enhance targeting and improve campaign performance.

Direct ad sales use cases include:

• Increased addressability: Publishers can meet advertisers’ demands by leveraging first-party data and contextual insights to create compelling packages based on content dynamics and audience behavior. Developing audiences with first-party data and a strong identity foundation helps maximize advertiser reach while meeting audience targeting requirements.
• Audience enrichment: Publishers can grow direct ad sales by external data partnerships to build more valuable audience profiles. By providing advertisers with enriched audience targeting capabilities, publishers can justify premium pricing and improve campaign performance.
• Advertiser data collaboration: Publishers can work closely with brands and agencies to develop highly targeted campaigns, such as custom media plans, tailored audience segments, or unique measurement solutions. By aligning inventory and data with advertiser goals, publishers can offer differentiated, high-impact ad opportunities that drive better results.

Expand Beyond Programmatic Advertising to New Opportunities

Investing heavily in owned identity graphs and first-party data infrastructure will define the leaders in the next era of privacy-focused advertising. While maximizing programmatic and direct ad revenue is often the immediate driver, strong identity management offers much deeper organizational benefits. A composable and extensible identity graph not only unlocks short-term revenue gains but also creates long-term strategic advantages, leading to enhanced organizational efficiencies, better audience experiences, and the flexibility to explore valuable new opportunities with advertising partners.

Publishers are using their identity graphs to:

• Centralize advertising and marketing teams on common technology for optimal audience experiences: A strong identity infrastructure is key not only to advertising teams focused on monetization but also to marketing teams tasked with growing visitors and engagement to a publisher’s or media owner’s properties. To truly embrace content relevancy and personalization, both teams need information about their audiences.
• Break down data silos and create a deeper understanding of audience value: Identity graphs are a key input to business intelligence. The ability of an identity graph to tie audience behavior across various areas of a publisher’s network, as well as multiple sites, means it is crucial in their ability to understand audience lifetime value, acquisition costs, and other key metrics.
• Form partnerships for non-traditional methods of monetization: Many publishers and media owners possess incredibly unique insights about their audiences that can be valuable both to other publishers and to advertisers and even to adjacent businesses. Data clean room technologies can enable publishers to safely sync their data with other partners without sharing private information about their audiences. This puts publishers in a position to explore new forms of monetization, such as licensing agreements or data cooperatives, to establish new revenue streams.
• Power the next generation of agentic AI systems: By providing AI agents with a flexible, comprehensive identity foundation, publishers can facilitate the secure and efficient interaction of buy- and sell-side agents within data clean room environments.

Choose Optable for Identity Management

Optable is the identity management and data collaboration platform designed for the advertising ecosystem in the age of privacy. We empower media owners, publishers, and platforms to harness the power of their first-party data. Our platform makes it easy to assemble an identity graph across all sources, enrich it with leading partner data sets, and use the identity graph for activation in the channels that matter the most.

Ad sellers need a complete set of tools to support the many different ways that they monetize their audience data. For programmatic revenue, Optable makes it easy to plug into ID frameworks like UID 2.0, ID5, Yahoo Connect ID, and many others. Additionally, publishers with unique first-party audience data can port data into leading marketplaces like The Trade Desk and curation platforms such as Pubmatic and Index Exchange. This allows publishers to explore different monetization strategies and meet buyers where they are looking to activate.

Data-driven sales teams win more share of ad spend. Optable makes it easy for media owners to collect, analyze, and activate audience data, no matter how complex their network or distribution is. Optable’s purpose-built tools for signal enrichment, audience building, attribute enrichment, clean room collaboration, and agentic audience planning mean that sales teams can respond faster to RFPs, deliver more relevant audiences, and offer deeper insights to their advertising partners.

Optable’s identity solutions have transformed the way we manage data, offering unparalleled control and insights. We’ve seen significant improvements in yield optimization, making it an invaluable part of our programmatic strategy.” - Patrick McCann, Senior Vice President of Research, Raptive

Take control of your future in digital media with confidence. Contact Optable today to learn how our identity management solutions can help you!

This blog offers a brief overview of key findings from the State of Audience Data Monetization 2025 report, in partnership with Digiday. To explore all the survey results and insights, download the full report here→

As the digital advertising landscape faces its most profound transformation in over a decade, one fact has emerged for publishers: first-party data, identity, and partnerships are the new currencies of monetization.

The once-dominant and available third-party signals are fading, and the fragmented nature of audience signals has made addressability more complex than ever. In this shifting environment, publishers are being asked to do more than serve content; they must own, structure, and activate their audience data with precision and accountability.

Why Identity Is Now Central

Historically, publishers operated on a principle: “If we publish great content, people will come.” That still holds true. But as signal loss deepens and AI steals traffic, quality content alone isn't enough to drive revenue. Advertisers increasingly demand proof of audience value, and that starts with the ability to recognize, organize, and activate users at scale.

This is where identity graphs come in. Built on first-party signals like subscriptions, email logins, and on-site behaviors, identity graphs allow publishers to construct a unified, durable understanding of their audiences, without relying on cookies or opaque third-party data.

According to the 2025 Digiday x Optable survey, 78% of publishers are already using or building an identity graph, underscoring the urgent need to take control of audience recognition and monetization.

“By taking control of identity yourself — and not relying on browser-based cookies —publishers are better set up for the future. You own more of the way you connect with partners.”
— Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer, Raptive

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Building a Future-Proof Foundation

At Optable, we believe publishers shouldn’t have to choose between scale and privacy, speed and safety, or automation and control. Our platform was purpose-built for this moment, empowering publishers to:

• Build composable, interoperable identity graphs that bridge online and offline data.
  
  
• Resolve identities in real time across browsers, devices, and environments using trusted alternatives like UID 2.0 and Yahoo ConnectID.
  
  
• Activate audiences where it counts, including DSPs, ad servers, CTV, clean room collaborations, and more.
  
  

And we don’t stop at identity. With Optable’s Agentic Collaboration framework, autonomous AI agents help publishers go from audience planning to campaign activation in minutes (not weeks) while preserving privacy and governance every step of the way. 

Why It Matters Now

As third-party identifiers disappear and AI is reshaping how content is discovered and monetized, owning audience identity is how publishers stay relevant—ensuring addressability, powering AI-driven workflows, and maintaining direct advertiser relationships. 

In today’s market, identity is not just infrastructure. It’s a publisher's leverage. And in a world reshaped by AI and privacy, it’s the only sustainable currency publishers can truly own. 

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Want to see how it could work for your team?
Reach out to our team to book a personalized walkthrough or see a demo of Optable in action. Contact our experts now or email sales@optable.co to start the conversation.

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The advertising world has officially entered the agentic era — a shift where specialized AI agents assist humans in planning, negotiating, and optimizing media buys. Yet, for all the excitement about their potential, one challenge remains: these systems don’t yet speak the same language.

AdCP, MCP, and WTF

To solve this problem, the consortium of adtech and media companies has started work on Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard that defines how AI systems communicate and collaborate across advertising platforms. AdCP gives agents the structure and context they need to work together accurately and efficiently. It is built on Model Context Protocol, or MCP, the underlying framework that allows AI models to connect to external systems securely.

Optable recently sponsored Digiday’s explainer video, which unpacks the MCP in detail. We recommend watching it to refresh your understanding of the protocol — the foundation for AdCP. Read the full article on Digiday →

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What Does AdCP Mean for Publishers?

For publishers, AdCP is a gateway to participating in the next generation of digital advertising, powered by intelligent automation, transparency, and interoperability. 

Those who move first gain an advantage — not only in speed and efficiency, but in access to a fast-growing ecosystem of AI-enabled buyers. Getting AdCP-ready early helps ensure your inventory and audiences are discoverable by these buyers as adoption accelerates.

AdCP enables direct, intelligent communication between publisher systems and advertiser agents. These agents assist their human directors in negotiating, planning, and executing campaigns directly — with clear rules and full auditability.

In practical terms, that means publishers can make their inventory, audiences, and packaging options discoverable to AI-driven buyers, all while maintaining control of their data.

AdCP standardizes how AI agents collaborate, serving as the connect-the-dots layer. It enables intelligent agents on both sides of the marketplace to understand and transact with each other — transforming publisher data into a dynamic source of value.

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Why Did Optable Join the Initiative?

Optable joined AdCP as a founding member because the future of AI in advertising must be open, collaborative, and grounded in trust.

Our mission has always been to make it easier for the advertising ecosystem to analyze, connect, and activate its data. Through our Agentic Collaboration framework, Optable has already implemented AdCP-compatible workflows with pilot publishers.

Roll in to our beta program to implement the Optable Planner Agent — the AI-powered sales assistant that automates ad-planning workflows from RFP to activation, built on the same AdCP principles shaping the future of advertising.

We believe the advertising ecosystem only thrives when publishers retain ownership of their data and when innovation happens in the open. AdCP provides the structure to ensure a future where AI accelerates opportunity rather than creating new silos.

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Why Publishers Should Get Involved

AI-driven buying is no longer theoretical; many leading companies are already experimenting with automated campaign planning and media activation. To stay visible to these new forms of demand, publishers need to ensure their inventory is accessible through AdCP.

Joining early doesn’t just provide access — it offers influence. Publishers that embrace agentic systems like Optable Planner today will be ready to support AdCP workflows as they are rolled out in the industry, enabling interoperability with buy-side agents. The benefits are tangible: improved operational efficiency, greater transparency in demand, and inclusion in the growing ecosystem of AI-native media buying.

Learn more about the initiative at: https://adcontextprotocol.org/

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Becoming AI-Ready: Building on Strong Identity Foundations

AI readiness starts with data readiness. For agents to operate effectively, publishers need the right audience and identity infrastructure, along with control and compliance safeguards that keep data within trusted boundaries. Agents (almost) can’t do miracles, but they can help teams automate, streamline existing workflows, and break down silos. To do so, they require reliable data to transact. A strong identity and audience foundation are essential for benefiting from promising agentic capabilities. 

That’s where Optable comes in. Our platform provides the identity solutions and safe environment publishers need to participate confidently in the agentic ecosystem. 

 Learn how to build an identity spine with Optable →

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Key Considerations for Publishers Participating in the AdCP Initiative

Publishers using agents on the Optable platform can automate workflows while maintaining complete control over their data and decision-making. 

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Data stays in your ownership: It never leaves your Optable tenant.
  
• No pooling: Your data isn’t mixed with anyone else’s.
  
• Secure access only: Optable Planner Agent users don't need to see or access user data directly — it builds relevant signals from marketing briefs written in natural language.
  
• Low sales overhead: Agentic workflows reduce manual sales effort to near zero.
  
• Full transparency: You can see which buyers are activating audiences and view their prompts to understand campaign intent.
  
• Data separation maintained: Each publisher’s data remains in its own deal; buyers receive a list of relevant opportunities to target from their DSP — never a blended dataset.

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Building the Future of Agentic Advertising

Publishers are entering a new phase — one where AI agents can strengthen data value and elevate relationships with partners. Experimentation and adoption are already underway, and Optable is helping shape this transformation in the best interests of publishers.

By embedding the Ad Context Protocol within our Agentic Collaboration framework, Optable provides a secure, interoperable, and controllable environment where publisher and buyer agents can collaborate seamlessly.

In this evolving landscape, Optable serves as the identity and collaboration layer of agentic advertising, empowering publishers to turn intelligence into long-term advantage. 

Reach out to our experts at sales@optable.co to learn more about agentic advertising.

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