Our annual State of the Industry report in partnership with Digiday is here! This year we focused on a hot topic: tracking the transformation of data unification, revenue diversification and brands’ data investments.

It’s no secret that publishers and their advertising partners are becoming more reliant on customer data platforms and other technologies to unify audience and customer information. Why? Because when publishers succeed at that step, their advertising partners also get a lift. They are able to strengthen and diversify campaign performance via audience, contextual, lookalike and cross-device targeting, retargeting and highly detailed reporting on performance — all with the help of their supporting brands and agencies.

Not to mention, their audience gets a much more relevant and personalized experience.

The ever-changing landscape of publishing means that these companies not only have to “keep up with the Joneses” but find ways to unlock new revenue streams, such as the ability to offer valuable and privacy-compliant data to advertisers and third-party partners, develop subscriptions and more.

To meet that challenge, publishers are focusing on the plethora of contextual data their pages can generate as third-party cookies fall away. They’re also parsing diverse data sets, including website analytics, email subscriber lists, registration information, third-party demographic info, purchase histories and more.

So, we wanted to understand how they were thinking about this, meeting these needs and thinning about the future.

To further explore how data-management-related offerings and relationships are evolving, Digiday and Piano surveyed hundreds of publishers, brands and agencies. This new report dives into how publisher teams are collecting, unifying, segmenting and analyzing data as privacy regulations increase and advertiser expectations expand, as well as the challenges they’re facing along the way and the advantages they’re presenting to the brands and agencies with which they work.

This report is ungated and complimentary. We hope you enjoy its findings as much as we did.

Read the report