PALM SPRINGS, Calif — The publisher whose brands include AskMen, PCMag, Mashable and the Ookla Speedtest service has a clear focus on the tech vertical.

But Ziff-Davis doesn’t want to leave its advertisers to rely on off-the-shelf “tech” audience segments to reach their customers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ziff Davis Senior Vice President, Strategy and Growth, Jason Sinnarajah explains that the company is keen on directly collecting audience data for itself to help those advertisers.

“We’re collecting about 200 million cookies, on average, across all of the Ziff Davis portfolio,” he says. “More and more marketers are looking for first party data. We (also) actually sell audience profiles in the ad tech ecosystem.”

Sinnarajah says that is “really attractive to advertisers like Best Buy, because they know that they can go and target those folks that are really in the market (who are) about to buy a television”.

Next up, however, Sinnarajah wants to tackle the growing challenge of changing consumer behaviour – the reality that many peopl enow consume the same media property across multiple different devices.

Piecing together the breadcrumb trails of those data, in to a single consumer profile, remains a tricky task for everyone in the industry – but one which several vendors now purport to have solved.

“Cross-device ID matching is probably … where the growth opportunities are,” he says. “For us at Ziff Davis, that’s something that we are definitely looking at. We have a wide range of email address information, lead gen information, that we’d love to match up with ID’s as well. And then being able to do it across devices.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.