Innovid Key | GTM Strategy

Overview

In the Summer of 2021, Innovid embarked on a mission to formalize our position as it related to identity resolution within the advertising ecosystem. I lead the initiative in partnership with Drew Paquette, VP of Identity, and Arik Shahar, SVP of Data & Identity, with oversight from Dale Older, CPO, and Stephanie Geno, CMO. 

The prior fall, we had dipped our toe into identity within CTV, to mixed results. But as the topic of identity gained steam with cookie deprecation fears and rolling privacy regulation announcements from governments and big data companies, Innovid needed to get clear, internally and externally, on how our complete product offering related to identity resolution.

Internal Alignment & POV Generation

Starting small, a pool of individuals at Innovid, including myself, Drew, and Arik, developed a task force to discuss what we felt should be our stance, and what we had been hearing from clients. 

During this conversation, we generated a few preliminary hypotheses and a skeleton framework of our proposed way forward. This included the following principles: 

  • Third-party cookie deprecation was a warning shot across the bow. We believe (and we’ve already seen signs of it) that data signal degradation will increase at a rapid rate over the next 2 years. Any solution that focuses on replacing the cookie or device ID with a new data signal will end up in the same boat very quickly. 

  • First-party data activation is the future of digital advertising. Brands will need to invest in their own ecosystems and build relationships directly with consumers in order to continue to enjoy the rich data lakes they’ve grown to rely on. Brands that do this right through clear consumer education about what they collect and how they use that data will be rewarded with consumer loyalty.

  • Third-party ID alternatives, including email-based identifiers, offer promising signal quality but at limited scale. We absolutely think there’s merit to these solutions, and we’re going to talk through how we’re working with them, but this isn’t the silver bullet the industry thought it was six months ago (given Apple’s recent announcements around Hide My Email features). 

  • Lastly, we believe that Fingerprinting (the practice of taking signals from a device, browser, etc, with or without consent), is fundamentally flawed and downright risky and will hurt the digital industry as a whole. We believe that any solution that uses fingerprinting is a collision course with privacy regulations and will be shut down.

Customer Validation 

To gain direct customer validation to ensure that our product management had a good understanding of the market needs, we launched an Identity Design Partnership program for a set of  “friendly” customers, in which product managers would meet with clients to talk about identity and gather feedback on the architecture of our potential solution. 

Sample questions: 

  • What is your definition of Identity?

  • Where does identity fall on your priority list and why?

  • How does this solution address your needs as you see them in 3 months? One year? 

Over three months, we conducted 30+ interviews and gained a ton of insight. The only problem? Getting everyone to agree on one approach.

Innovid’s Identity Manifesto

In order to align internally and get everyone speaking the same language around identity, I decided to write up a Manifesto of sorts. The manifesto needed to outline our positoning without going straight into our product approach, which we had yet to formalize in any commercialized capacity.

“Talk to any marketer in 2021, and you’ll hear a similar story. Concerns around shifting audiences, signal loss, converging content, tech consolidation, walled garden expansions, and what, if any, data they can have ownership over, has driven anxiety to a fever pitch. The holy grail for any brand is a 360° understanding of their customer, but not at the cost of coming off creepy - that price is too high. And if consumer privacy is paramount, where does that leave marketers in terms of unlocking their messages reach, frequency, relevance, and ultimately, ROI?

It feels like there have been hundreds of proposed solutions in the past year to tackle identity resolution, elbowing to edge one another out with their “tracking” synonymous names, promising universal coverage, and total privacy compliance. They’ve come from every corner of the ecosystem - not just ad tech, but media providers, browsers, app stores, platforms, even some of the largest advertisers in the world have thrown their ideas into the ring. And as quickly as they arise, they fall - it’s enough to give any marketer whiplash. Many buried in the identity graveyard either forgot the end goal - to create a privacy-friendly internet for ALL - or they put all their eggs in one data-signals basket, only to wake up and find the world had changed. The good news for marketers? The solutions that have survived have two major things in common: they’re independent, meaning there’s little to no conflict of interest for brands, and they’re interoperable, meaning they’re built to work together.

Innovid has been measured in our approach to identity, but making small steps has allowed us to avoid the major missteps that many of our competitors have proposed. We can see clearly that the way forward is not by working with or building one-solution-to-rule-them-all, but instead integrating with and enhancing the continuously evolving identity ecosystem. At Innovid, Identity is baked into our platform infrastructure, vs. standing alone as a siloed product. We’re focused on integrating numerous interoperable solutions, thus allowing us to offer an accurate and persistent method of resolving identity regardless of device.”

The manifesto was a big hit and gained the go order to launch the development of our identity framework and subsequent product positioning.

Naming Innovid Key

The next big hurdle was naming. This was a unique challenge in that I wasn’t launching a standalone, siloed product, I was establishing an infrastructure approach that would underpin all of our products moving forward. I’d be lying if I said generating the name for Innovid Key was easy, but in the end, it proved to be a no-brainer. 

The approach we took was simple; I did what every hot-blooded marketer does - I built a spreadsheet. On it, I listed the names of competitive solutions in the market, other products under the Innovid banner, terms I wanted to be associated with, and a running list of ideas. Innovid Key was the clear winner for a few reasons. 

  1. Our identity solution was grounded at the household level - and what unlocks a household? A Key. 

  2. Our identity solution needed to plug into others in the marketplace, and we liked the idea of it being a skeleton key to unlock an advertiser's business objectives. 

  3. For our geeky audience, the term “key” is used heavily regarding database management. 

To add to the name, we decided that future third-party partners who integrated with the solution would be dubbed Key Connect partners.

Branding Innovid Key

Once we had our name, it was time to discuss brand identity. For this part, I worked closely with our VP of Creative, Shai Ryter, to outline how Innovid Key should be visualized. Given that it wasn’t a product anyone would engage with directly, it was critical that we had a visual that made the framework feel real. For this, we decided on a 3D illustrated approach that outlined the underlying parts that made the Innovid Key solution unique and, ultimately, how it helped out clients achieve their goals. 

Launching Innovid Key 

When thinking about the broader launch of Innovid Key, I kept coming back to one simple reality: the identity conversation was a FAST MOVIE, OVERSATURATED topic. Therefore, the launch had to be unique in its execution and approach. First a foremost, this meant writing any sort of formalized report would be impossible. By the time we got the required approvals, the content would be outdated. Instead, I set our communications team on a different path.

The Infographic

A lot of the identity conversation focused on the marketers - how they felt about signal loss, etc. But only a few reports were interested in the consumer perspective. I recommended deploying a poll to marketers and consumers as it related to their thoughts on identity management, signal loss, consumer data collection, privacy legislation, and more. The concept was to expose the different sentiments around identity resolution from consumers and marketers and propose Innovid Key as a way to close the gap. From this commissioned research, the Innovid marketing team launched an infographic highlighting the deltas we found, further enforcing Innovid Key’s practical approach.

The Website

In tandem, we decided that even though Innovid Key would not be a standalone solution, it needed a product homepage on Innovid.com where we could highlight the messaging around the solution and showcase the key benefits. Much of the original manifesto was used in generating the page and subsequent content.

The Press Approach

Given the strategy around the proprietary commissioned research, we had a good angle to bring the Innovid Key solution to press without it falling flat as just another product release. On Sept 15, 2021, we formally launched the infographic and website materials. A little over a month later, we announced our first Key Connect partner LiveRamp, and client, Molson Coors, with a subsequent press release and byline in AdWeek. 

The Marketing Results

  • The Identity Infographic beat Innovid page view benchmarks by 3X, with over 3.5 minutes spent on the page, increasing overall time spent on Innovid.com by 13%. 

  • Launch emails to our database promoting the Identity Infographic resulted in 10% higher open rate than average.

  • The Identity product homepage page beat Google page view benchmarks by 3X sans paid marketing support.  

  • The campaign gathered over 1M impressions from organic press release pick-up across publications such as MarTech Series and Broadcasting & Cable.