Magna and OpenAP strike data deal for audience targeting

Magna and advertising consortium OpenAP are partnering on an initiative to standardize television ad-buying across both digital and linear.

Under the partnership, announced Tuesday, the IPG Mediabrands agency will use OpenAP’s identifier, OpenID, to buy audiences across publishers and across networks via Acxiom, a data broker IPG owns. Through the arrangement, OpenAP will share insights about those audiences and what they’re watching with advertisers, Brittany Slattery, OpenAP’s chief marketing officer, told us, providing a “unifying view” of the media ecosystem.

This specific partnership isn’t exclusive but will give Magna a “first mover advantage,” according to a press release.

Why that’s important: Identity solutions are a tricky business—there are at least a hundred of them, each claiming to help advertisers reach their intended audiences in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. And perhaps no ecosystem is more fragmented than television, an industry that’s balancing declining linear audiences with growing digital and CTV inventory.

OpenAP, which was created and is owned by major TV players including NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, helps advertisers buy and target audiences across its networks and streaming services, as brands move away from broad demographics, like women age 18 to 49, to more specific measures, like household income, buying history, or “moms with kids under three,” Slattery told Marketing Brew.

“We encourage our partners on the buy side to look at it from an audience-first strategy, not so much a channel-specific strategy or a platform-specific strategy,” she said.

+1: Magna isn’t the first agency to use OpenAP’s identifier. Last year, GroupM said it would begin using OpenID to buy programmatic TV inventory.