Advertisers rely on their ad server as the source of truth in the pursuit to verify and measure delivery and performance of media and creative. It’s the platform that aggregates and unifies data to connect customers, media and creative. Flashtalking is the leading independent global ad server for advertisers who value control of their data and wish to separate media sales from delivery and measurement. We’re leading the charge for open, integrated ad stacks that minimize friction between your ad tech ecosystem partners while eliminating conflicts of interest. Flashtalking enables advertisers to realize the promise of data-driven messaging while maintaining flexibility, independence and data ownership.
PRIMARY AD SERVING
Our new Campaign Manager is full-featured and lightning fast, with extensive capability for managing the largest and most complex campaigns, across desktop and mobile, and across display, rich media, video and native formats. It is the only platform that enables global frequency management across buying platforms. And its cutting edge API architecture allows easy integration into partner systems, which we are using to eliminate tag wrapping with verification partners such as DoubleVerify, IAS and Moat, and to programmatically propagate placements between Prisma, Flashtalking, and DSPs.
PERSONALIZATION
Flashtalking has long been known for its pioneering “decision tree” approach to dynamic creative personalization, and we have continued to innovate in this important area. Recently, we enhanced the personalization capabilities of IDConnect, allowing clients to choose any third-party identity marker as the basis of personalization in Flashtalking—all enabled without cookie matching. This means no data loss between Flashtalking and your DMP or DSP, so you have higher match rates and more effective personalization.
We have also launched Hedges, a robust spreadsheet-based tool that makes it fast and easy to build even the largest and most complex personalization campaigns. (Yes, it’s a funny product name. Our developers said they were building a “decision hedge” rather than a “decision tree”…and it stuck!) Hedges supports unlimited decision rules, and up to a million personalized versions.
And coming in October is our new Decision Tree UI. Built on the same platform APIs that support Hedges, the new Decision Tree UI incorporates several new features and performance enhancements that will give advertisers greater flexibility, speed and ease of use when building and visualizing their personalization strategies in the platform. This is something we can demo for you today—we think you will find it to be pretty slick and very exciting!
IDENTITY ORCHESTRATION
The cookie is dead. Recent moves by Apple, Firefox and Google Chrome to curb the abuse of third party cookies has rendered cookies nearly useless for legitimate analytics purposes. Today, any analysis performed on cookie-based data—including DCM—will contain serious distortions, including (on average) overstated reach (+90%), understated frequency (-43%), and understated attributed conversions (-41%) as documented in Flashtalking’s Cookie Rejection Report. This distortion of foundational data makes it impossible to use cookies to measure the basic performance of online media, and provides false signals that make most campaign optimization efforts counter-productive.
Enter Flashtalking FTrack. Our cookieless tracking technology uses non-PII signals to establish a more stable tracking identity for analytic use. FTrack is privacy-safe, and GDPR-compliant. It is not based on offline identity, has full opt-out, and is never used to profile or monetize users. It offers more accurate reach, frequency and attribution signal than any other product available.
Flashtalking believes that ad server data belongs to you, the advertiser; it is our objective to deliver the highest quality data back to you. Our identity orchestration offering called IDconnect delivers. IDconnect appends our FTrack ID as well as any partner ID you desire (e.g. website analytics ID, DMP audience ID, identity graph ID, viewability ID, DSP ID, third-party data ID) to each impression record in the log file. In doing so, Flashtalking provides the advertiser with a fully integrated, high-integrity, ready-to-use data set for analytics. This unique product eliminates 80% of the data alignment and cleansing work typically required for advanced analytics.
ADVANCED ANALYTICS
Built into the ad server is Encore, the industry’s best Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) solution. That is not puffery. It is the best because IDconnect feeds it a better, cleaner data set than any other MTA provider can claim to have. With better data going in, the models that assign credit are so strong, we make them 100% transparent. Yes, you read that correctly. We give the advertiser complete transparency to the algorithm, the model accuracy, and the underlying raw data so you can have complete confidence in the recommendations to optimize spend. But Encore goes even further, providing creative optimization recommendations using a machine learning algorithm that isolates the impact of each creative concept while controlling for audience and media bias. As it turns out, Flashtalking Creative Analytics is the most powerful lever advertisers can pull to improve the productivity of their media investment.
SUPPORT, KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL COVERAGE
In the end, success in this business has always been about people. Unlike the big tech players, Flashtalking will continue to distinguish ourselves with the most knowledgeable, most capable and most tenured team in our industry. And while we are committed to being there for our clients when they need us, we don’t want to create dependency hostages. Instead, we want to do everything we can to help our clients and agency partner build their own organizational capabilities by:
-
Productizing our collective experience and best practices into a comprehensive knowledge base
-
Providing consulting services including creative strategy and process design workshops
-
Developing an ANA thought leadership platform
-
Providing an extensive training and certification program, Flashtalking Campus, around the world
-
Aggressively expanding presence in Europe (Spain, Italy, France) and APAC (Hong Kong, Singapore) to meet the needs of our global advertising clients.
THE ADOBE PARTNERSHIP
Our strategy is resonating with advertisers and the industry. In just the last six months alone, we have been selected by some of the biggest, most prestigious brands in the world as their primary ad server partner and as personalization partner. But most tellingly, we have been selected by Adobe as their global ad serving partner.
Adobe products are pervasive among the top tier clients we aim to serve, but Adobe does not have an ad server. So Adobe and Flashtalking have teamed up to provide an integrated solution to advertisers. We are in the middle of an aggressive technology integration agenda that will provide real value to our shared clients. Whether you only use Adobe Analytics, or have also adopted Audience Manager, Tag Manager or Adobe DSP (aka TubeMogul), Flashtalking is integrating in a variety of ways to give you new capabilities and make your life easier.