Team Alliant is always excited to bring forward viewpoints from companies that share a passion for innovative audience solutions. The Ally is a Q&A series where advertising industry movers and shakers share unique perspectives on audience data, the advertising landscape, and their personal approach to navigating an evolving industry.  

In this edition of The Ally, Matthew Papa, VP, Partnerships at OpenAP, discusses the partnership with Alliant, as well as the role of data in CTV and what to should expect from the channel in 2025. 

Can you describe the OpenAP and Alliant partnership and how this will help facilitate better outcomes for advertisers?

I lead OpenAP’s Business Development and Partnerships organization which entails looking after and growing partnerships within the OpenAP linear and digital ecosystem. Naturally, this includes data partnerships, which help to facilitate our mission of bringing the power of advanced audiences to premium video environments.  

Alliant is the right partner because they possess the depth, breadth and accuracy of data that works across brand advertising needs, especially TV. Access to diverse data can play a very powerful role in the video landscape, shaping how buyers use and measure data. OpenAP and Alliant are partnering to bring Alliant’s data to the Open Audience Platform for advertisers and agencies to use in campaigns across the premium video ecosystem.  

Also, for the past 50 to 60 years, legacy panel-based demo data has been the dominant way to transact TV inventory. Since its inception, OpenAP has worked to make buying on diversified, people-based audiences as easy, and with the same benefits, as buying on demos. Being able to work with premium data providers like Alliant that can fill the void of unique and optimized-for-TV data that goes beyond demographics will benefit both the supply and buy sides.  

Where do you see the biggest opportunities within the data-driven marketing industry right now?

In general, I’d say data can help to remove the silos across publishers, screens, currencies and more, resulting in better marketing outcomes and attribution. By unifying data and identity, we can better support omnichannel measurement across premium data-driven video. Better measurement will support better media buying intelligence and outcomes, which in turn brings consistent revenue growth to media brands. 

What roles do first- and third-party data have in the TV ecosystem, and how do they coexist?

They are complimentary to each other with both types of data playing a unique role in TV signal and targeting. First-party data will always be the lifeblood of marketer-defined audiences, but third-party data is essential to understand different attributes of those audiences.   

I believe that the signal derived from third-party data, and the science behind it, can act as a powerful ingredient combined with first-party data. Data providers like Alliant can bring purchase, demographic, lifestyle and even TV subscriber and viewership data to the table offering enhanced insights and targeting capabilities in Advanced TV. 

One of the big trends in CTV is that convergent buys (linear + digital) are emerging as a data-first investment channel, as advanced audiences have become ubiquitous across verticals and buying strategies. 

What are some new initiatives your organization has on the horizon to better serve customers?

OpenAP recently introduced Open Identity, a federated identity data infrastructure that seamlessly enables direct matching of identity data across publishers, advertisers and data providers without requiring a central identity spine. Open Identity provides an interoperable, direct matching methodology that minimizes identity loss between partners and allows our advertiser clients to choose their preferred identity source and control all the translations between identity spaces that occur, offering a system that can be used to observe and guarantee consistency from audience onboarding through to measurement. 

What changes should we expect in CTV throughout this year?

We should expect a lot of conversation around how to bring more buyers into this ecosystem. Liquidity in ad-supported CTV is shockingly low, roughly 40-50%. Universal Ads, tvScientific, and others have a sound thesis, which is that enabling SMBs to buy CTV is an opportunity to shift budget away from search. OpenAP is here to turn those conversations into reality and accelerate the growth of TV advertising. 

We hope you found this edition of the Ally informative. If you would like to connect with Alliant and discuss audience data and TV advertising possibilities, please reach out, we would love to hear from you.