Tech Bites: Week of January 6, 2020

Sojern targets independent hotels with subscription marketing platform

Sojern announced that it will offer its digital marketing solutions to independent hotel and chain properties as a subscription. The move, according to the company, makes the enterprise-grade technology developed to power marketing campaigns for the world’s biggest travel brands available to smaller hotels for a fraction of the price.

The platform is positioned as a complement to distribution deals with online travel agencies (OTAs). Sojern's platform delivers personalized advertising to consumers across multiple devices and digital channels such as Facebook and Instagram, video, display ads, and search. 

The platform helps identify in-market travelers and drives direct bookings and web traffic on the hotel’s own website, thus fostering direct customer relationships for the hotel, Sojern said.

In addition to a fixed monthly fee plan, the company also offers the platform on a "Pay On The Stay" basis. In this commission model, Sojern takes on the risk of running digital media campaigns and hotels only pay for completed stays.

Pubmatic looks beyond cookies with new tool

In an effort to solve restrictions over the use of third-party cookies to track audiences, due to mounting privacy regulations, digital advertising tech company PubMatic today launched its PubMatic Identity Hub identity management solution.

This offering extends the open-source User ID module in the company's Prebid offering, making it easier for publishers to monetise programmatically and ensure buyers can recognize and bid on their desired audiences as third-party cookies become more restricted, PubMatic said in a statement. Growing consumer unease over being tracked by cookies has made it challenging for the digital advertising and impacting buyers' ad performance and return on ad spend. 

“The rapid expansion of ID choices is creating growing complexity. Buyers and publishers need less confusion, not more,” Ankur Srivastava, director of product management at PubMatic, said in a release. By extending open-source code from Prebid, PubMatic’s Identity Hub addresses this challenge by simplifying the use of multiple IDs.

Identity Hub is a software management layer built on top of Prebid’s User ID module that allows publishers to support multiple IDs for each ad impression, thereby ensuring that buyers can recognise the publisher’s audience and bid more on its inventory, maximising publisher revenue and buyer campaign performance. So, by using Identity Hub, users can increase programmatic ad revenue by ensuring digital ad buyers can recognise the publisher’s audience and bid higher for inventory, according to the company.