Personagraph Questions ‘Premium Inventory’

Founded in 1990, Intertrust Technologies Corporation has a long history of providing computing products and services to global enterprises. Last month, Intertrust announced the next generation of Personagraph, the private marketplace for advertisers and digital marketers.

Put simply, Personagraph offers agencies and brands audience intelligence gathered from 1.5 billion devices globally, according to Steven Rahman, director of product marketing, Personagraph. The platform reaches 300 million devices in the United States — over 120 million households.

“Essentially, we’re extending the digital rights and trusted platform that Intertrust has built over time to the ad-tech space,” Rahman said. “Personagraph offers solutions for brands and agencies seeking to precisely reach mobile audiences.”

Through two products — PG Edge, the consumer data management platform, and PG Axis, the private marketplace for mobile app inventory — Personagraph offers custom targeted segments derived from a combination of first-party mobile application data, CRM databases and offline purchases.

PG Edge, available as SaaS or a white-label product, manages the multi-party data and ensures its security leveraging existing Intertrust technologies, including authentication and security management with machine learning and AI capabilities. PG Axis allows publishers to enable advertising based on various audience profiles.

“We match to comScore audience segments,” Rahman said. “That’s a big selling point.”

Using proprietary algorithms and an inference engine, Rahman said Personagraph is able to determine if a device owner is part of a given segment. He gave an example, noting that the actual segments can be far more targeted and specific in practice.

“Let’s say you want to target soccer moms who are really into country music,” Rahman said. “Based on payment information, first-party publisher data and the way users have set their phones, we’re able to segment the device owners. If we recognize the device IDs, we can allow advertisers to serve particular video ads to the mobile devices of soccer moms interested in country music.”

Rahman noted that, like most cloud-based data management platforms, Personagraph is releasing PG Edge updates and improvements on a rolling basis, continually testing and releasing new functionalities. The next major advance to the technology will be announced on March 1 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

While the specific details have yet to be released, Rahman hinted at what’s next for Personagraph.

“What we’ll be trying to do is to upend the notion that there is something called ‘premium inventory,’” he said. “People are paying a lot of money for ad placement, but we have discovered by working with game makers and publishers that, while Google and Facebook dominate 80 percent or so of the online mobile market for advertising, there’s an absolute ton of things people can do outside of those walled gardens.”

Looking at the iOS App Store, Rahman noted, the top paid apps and the top grossing apps aren’t Facebook or Google. A majority of the top paid apps are mobile games, and the top grossing apps are mobile games, along with streaming services like Netflix and Pandora.

“Users have a whole life outside Google and Facebook,” Rahman said, “but marketers are presently paying way too much to reach customers via premium inventory.”

Rahman gave an example of the upcoming feature. If a marketer wants to reach New York Times subscribers, they don’t necessarily have to place an ad in The New York Times to reach them. Rather, Personagraph could work to find non-premium commonalities between device owners who also engage with The New York Times.

“It’s the same device owner regardless,” Rahman said. “Why pay a premium to advertise in The New York Times when they can pay a more reasonable, market-determined price for access to the device via a mobile game or another non-premium publisher?”