Five mobile ad industry firms have joined forces to launch what they say is the industry’s first advertiser data-driven Collective.
The Collective, a joint project led by Kochava, and backed by mobile media sources including AdXcel, Altrooz, Appia and Liquid, is designed to enable meaningful audience matches to be made between advertisers and publishers without advertisers having to sacrifice their unique user data in order to benefit from collective intelligence.
“Asking an advertiser to hand over their unique user data is akin to asking a professional sports team to hand over their playbook, along with notes on what’s working and what’s not, to their competitors,” said Kochava CEO, Charles Manning. “The Collective believes that the advertiser’s data is their data and we adhere to how the advertiser wants their data to be treated. At the same time, publishers want to make their audience data available to advertisers to enable better targeting, filtering and ad buying at scale. We achieve both with The Collective.”
The companies involved in the Collective have created what they describe as “the largest and first-ever Mobile Graph” (though we’re not sure if Facebook and Google would concur) from which advertisers can create and then target custom audiences. The Mobile Graph consists of a pool of network-supplied data sets; an API layer for the exchange of information between advertisers, publishers and measurement companies; and the Audience Manager, a tool for creating precisely-targeted audience lists.
The Collective will tap into the Kochava’s pool of 1,200 ad networks and publishers to deliver broad audience segments to advertisers, with no overlap across the multiple ad networks selected for the campaigns. In effect it acts as a matchmaker between the advertiser and the networks and their meaningful publisher sources. The advertiser leverages The Collective to determine the best networks to reach the users it wants to reach, without having to hand over any of their first-party data.
The Collective uses an Audience API Layer, developed by Kochava, to keep customer data and measurement data secure and independent, so that personally-identifiable information (PII) is always abstracted and obstructed from being shared by the advertisers using The Collective. 
Equally, The Collective does not pass Device IDs to the advertisers, but instead, leverages its connections with the networks to programmatically recommend the ideal network to reach each audience member on an advertiser’s target list. As the advertiser changes the criteria used to target users, the network recommendation will also change.
Finally, the output of The Collective is a series of specified segments that are only accessible to the sourced publisher or media source for which the targeting applies with the advertiser, meaning that advertisers can easily search and publishers can easily target the intended audiences.
“The revolutionary targeting capabilities provided by The Collective will dramatically increase mobile ad campaign effectiveness for brand and performance advertisers alike,” said Erik Lundberg, chief revenue officer at AdXcel. “The Collective also increases the value of every ad impression for mobile publishers and programmatic exchanges. Everybody wins.”
The Collective will be led by Tan Tmangraksat, in the role of vice president of audience monetization. A 10-year digital ad industry veteran, he most recently led publisher solutions at Airpush. He said: “Mobile user acquisition campaigns are growing in cost as supply is shrinking with the steep spike in demand. The Collective stands to drive incredible efficiencies for mobile advertisers and we anticipate this project will have a snowball effect on the industry; the larger the pool of participants in The Collective, the greater the benefit for everyone involved. Join us, and together we will revolutionize mobile advertising.”
Theres more information about The Collective here.
