La Presse has partnered with Montreal-based adtech company Optable to offer a secure, privacy-first alternative to cookies for local advertisers. Through the partnership, advertisers are now to directly target consumers while respecting the privacy of their personal information.

“What we were trying to do was offer advertisers the ability to use their own segments and knowledge of their users in a secure manner,” says Geoffrey Bernard, VP of growth marketing for La Presse. “If an advertiser in the travel industry has identified 200,000 prospects, we’ll be able to do a match and serve advertising to those people on our platforms in secure manner with a direct buy activation. We also have a model that can say we have an extra 100,000 that are very close to those targets, and you can run advertising against them.”

Bernard says the technology is similar to Google customer match, but done through La Presse.

“What was important to us was the fact that neither La Presse nor the advertiser get access to personal information. We’re not storing the information the advertiser sends to the platform. The life expectancy of the data is only for as long as the transaction lasts. When the advertiser inputs the data, we do the match, and then it’s destroyed.”

Optable’s technology encrypts the information held by companies about their current or potential customers as well as the information held by digital platforms about their users. It then compares and cross-references this coded and anonymous data to generate unidentified and targeted audiences that can be solicited without compromising privacy.

La Presse, which operates in a not-for-profit structure, launched single sign-on for all its platforms last year to encourage readers to create a free account to continue readership. To date, 70% of the content consulted on La Presse platforms is by authenticated users.

Optable is a SaaS data connectivity platform designed for secure data collaboration for media and advertising in the age of privacy.