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We returned to the Beeler.Tech Navigator event this year to join fellow industry leaders in conversations about latent data, signal quality, practical AI applications, and more. Optable’s Director of Sales, Kristy Schafer, led a session with Tim Hurd, VP of Media at Goodway Group, to share how the agency rebuilt their audience stack.
That initiative produced Passport One, Goodway’s proprietary data and intelligence layer that centralizes audience creation and decisioning with the ability to activate across the ecosystem. Optable provides the identity, audience, and collaboration layer where clients onboard first-party data and Goodway centralizes its enterprise data partnerships.
What Goodway Built
The motivation was straightforward. Goodway wanted a system that allowed them to centralize audience creation and decisioning with the ability to activate across the ecosystem.
In practice, that resulted in:
- Client data onboarding dropped from four weeks to roughly five minutes.
- The data fees stacked into every activation came down.
- More spend now routes directly to the source: the publishers themselves.
- Planners can index and overlap consumer segments to hit multiple consumer profiles with more strategic impression targeting.
The goal throughout: more value out of every working dollar, with more of that revenue passing through to the content owner.
Why They Built It
Tim spent meaningful time on the why behind the work. Goodway's clients aren't simple. A single brand often needs to reach multiple consumer personas at once, against very different media outcomes across awareness, in-store visits, and new account creation.
That kind of complexity demands a centralized audience layer, where the same audience can be pushed out to a multitude of destinations rather than rebuilt for each one. His point landed cleanly: the more easily publishers can plug into that workflow, the easier it becomes to spend with them.
What This Means for Publishers
Asked what he most wants from publishers going forward, Tim was direct. He hopes publishers will build similar infrastructure on their side in the form of interoperable audience platforms.
The next phase on this journey is agent readiness. As both buyer- and seller-side agents evolve, publishers with a strong identity and audience layer will be the ones surfacing inside the agency's buying strategy.
Agencies will gain the ability to build audience strategies across publishers using the underlying metadata of each one's identity and audience infrastructure. In turn publishers can better monetize their first-party data while still allowing the agency to buy at scale from one centralized location.
What Happened to CPMs?
The question that probably mattered most to the audience came from a publisher in the room: what's happened to CPMs through all of this?
Tim's answer: CPMs have come down. The agency gets the efficiency it set out to capture, and more of that working media is now flowing straight to the publisher instead of being absorbed by the middle.
The broader upside for publishers willing to evolve in this direction:
- Less ad-tech in the way
- More paths to buying
- Broader inclusion in plans
That dynamic is exactly the upside Tim's pitch holds out for publishers willing to evolve in the direction he's describing.
He closed with a line that captured the whole posture:
"Democratize data access, and look at each other less as competitors and more as a cohort."
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