As we hit the home stretch in the Presidential election and other federal and statewide races, digital advertising spend continues to flourish.

But, candidates and their marketing teams may be fumbling on a key component of their playbook that could be the difference between first and second place: advertising to cookieless voters.

Google’s about-face (or flip flop) on deprecating cookies could lead advertisers — including political ones — to abandon their cookieless plans, but that would be shortsided as I explain below.

While the bulk of media attention is on the presidential election, there are also 468 Congressional races and a multitude of local elections. I would go as far as to say that a few politicians could sway their races by embracing cookieless, especially if their opponent neglects over half of the open web using Safari or Firefox browsers for example. There is an ocean of previously unreachable voters right in front of you, the billions of US consumers viewing content on cookieless browsers via mobile and desktop web.

It’s incredibly important to reach consumers where they consume content across mobile, desktop, or CTV. With emerging digital channels growing, those who do not advertise in cookieless environments may miss out on this campaign season’s biggest advantage.

Two Roads Ahead for the Candidates

Elections, at least in the United States, are often about choosing between two options. It’s either Republican or Democrat; left wing or right wing; yes or no on a proposition. Political candidates have some duality choices as well: whether to advertise only with third-party cookies, cookieless, or both. The good news is that candidates can — and should — advertise on both. But, like their for-profit corporate brethren, too few are embracing cookieless.

The polls make one thing abundantly clear: this will be a very close presidential election with multiple states currently within mere percentage points of each other. Even if the polls move in one direction or the other, there’s enough uncertainty that no one will know the winner until election night (and maybe thereafter).

The volume of ads seen in battleground states by the people who are legitimately swing votes are inundated with ads from both parties maligning their opponents and making conflicting claims. And while we historically think of TV ads as the bulk of political advertising, the money spent on digital continues to grow. Some estimates put it at 28% of all spent this cycle; 3x the figure from the last full election.

Valuable Audiences

Would Hillary Clinton have won the 2016 presidential election if she spent any time at all in Wisconsin? Flipping that state alone wouldn’t have procured enough electoral votes, but it was seen as emblematic of a campaign too confident in its superiority to a candidate to not do the simple work. She ended up losing the state by 23,000 votes as well as other important Midwest swing states like Michigan and Ohio. Today’s candidates need to assume nothing is certain and continue to reach every possible voter across the US.

Advertising allows candidates to  reach both cookieless and cookied users across all browsers.

Yes, Chrome dominates the browser market share with 52% in the US, 15% of those users have opted into cookieless settings, Safari has 32% and Firefox has 4% of audiences. There are plenty of registered and likely voters who may not watch much TV and are therefore only going to see political messages if those candidates advertise in cookieless environments.

Increased Attention Share

There’s a reason why both candidates prefer not to campaign in the same state at the same time. You don’t want to share the spotlight. Any candidate who embraces cookieless in a race where the competition doesn’t have a clear space to reach out to key audiences while the competitor is in the noisy cookied environment. Cookieless has a much lighter ad load overall, so every impression you serve has more impact.

It’s always interesting when someone living in an uncontested state travels to a swing state and suddenly sees the political ads they were missing.

Well, right now Internet users in swing states who are using cookieless browsers are just like those travelers. Campaigns that embrace cookieless can reach undecided voters in key regions on previously considered unreachable browsers.

Higher Performance

An underrated component of cookieless advertising is that ad load is generally faster in cookieless environments. Imagine paying good money to get in front of an undecided voter, only to waste that opportunity because the ad didn’t load before the user moved on. Finding the right audience is only one part of the equation; delivering your message clearly and completely is just as important. Cookieless achieves that.

Bigger Gains

Politicians love winning. Since there are far fewer bidders on ads in cookieless environments, win rates can be as high as 10X higher than bidding on third-party cookies. We also see engagement rates as high, if not higher, as in third-party cookie environments. This is crucial in the final weeks of the campaign when politicians have to spend before election day. Being in an environment with higher win rates alleviates stress that ads won’t run and allows the campaigns to focus on other pressing matters.

The Home Stretch

As with all campaign decisions, the best advertising strategies are built upon common sense. If you were driving to the polls, would you take the traffic-filled road or the wide open lane to get you to the polls before everyone else? Political campaigns often need everything to go right to win. Embracing cookieless this 2024 season could be the difference between getting elected versus giving a consolation speech.

The post This Campaign Season, Vote to Embrace Cookieless appeared first on AdMonsters.

The detrimental impact of third-party cookies on consumer privacy has been a hot industry topic for some time now, and with the deadline for cookie depreciation continuously being pushed back, more and more publishers are shrugging their shoulders to the end of cookies. Not surprisingly, only 32% of publishers are actively preparing for this change, according to a recent Teads survey.

The study surveyed 555 publishers across 58 countries, revealing an urgent need for the industry to adapt quickly. At Cannes, we met with Natalie Bastian, CMO of Teads, and were pleasantly surprised to be joined by Simon Klein, Global Head of Publishing. Onboard a yacht with a crisp blue aesthetic; we chatted about a future without cookies; the challenges publishers face, and Teads’ current initiatives to support them. 

As we navigate this complex environment, even a blind man could see that there are too many different types of ID solutions on top of Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

“One minute cookieless is here, the next it’s delayed, then it’s happening again, but we don’t know when,” Klein explained. “We are trying to educate publishers as much as possible on what’s available. At Teads, we are cookieless by default since 2018.We are willing to work with every solution that we believe could actually help publishers generate more revenue.”

Teads and Publishers: A Partnership Driving Mutual Success

In digital media there is a ton of trial and error. Now more than ever, publishers need to ensure their SSP partners are resourceful. One aspect of Teads that is a major resource to publishers is its tech and engineering team. With about 400 team members, both teams do a lot of the leg work when it comes to investigating and understanding the best solutions. 

According to Teads’ Publisher Preparedness study, 53% of publishers feel completely overwhelmed by the plethora of solutions. There are just too many. Through Teads’ Publisher Lab, the SSP hosts off-the-record conversations with publishers where they can all work together to derive roadmaps. 

Think of it as a therapy session for publishers. As a major player focusing on the buy and sell sides, Teads is in a unique position giving them a responsibility to share all of the trends and traction that they see happening on the buy side with their publishers and vice versa. 

“We are the connective tissue between all these publishers, but many aren’t necessarily talking to each other,” Bastian said. “Our workshops are cross-functional; we host the Publisher Lab quarterly on average, and we curate the conversation, but the publishers are the ones doing the talking.”

Keeping Publishers A Part of the Conversation 

This year is significant, with 64 elections worldwide involving 49% of the global population. For voters to be informed, they need to have access to news. News publications need ads to survive. Quality publishers and news journalists need the support of brands and if ads continue to fund journalism, then it makes news more widely accessible. Many news outlets are going to a paywall, only to find out that subscriptions can be a struggle. 

These outlets are turning on paywalls because they either need more funding to support their content or increase their first-party data set. Some of that is login-based, but even when logging in, it could still be free for readers.

“Many publishers are trying subscription or hybrid models to increase revenue,” Bastian explained. “We sit in a very unique position that is good for the consumer because we give them access to quality content. To keep this access open for everyone, it must be properly funded through quality ads and quality journalism.”

As Klein put it, at Teads, they are “making their pipes as efficient as possible.” That entails making their player a little quicker, and faster across every single environment, and making sure they have the critical pieces of their roadmap. When it comes to buyer partners, nearly 80% of Teads campaigns do not use a cookie-based solution. The need for urgent adoption is right in front of our faces, and while some are actively moving towards the cookiepocolypse, some are not moving as swiftly.

The post Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; The Cookieless Future Will Be Here Before We Know it appeared first on AdMonsters.

Today’s successful marketing strategies rely on accurate targeting and personalization.  Marketers who don’t have both aren’t likely to meet their KPIs.

TransUnion’s updated identity graph includes data representing 98% of the US population and with the help of advanced AI, it will deliver more precise identity resolution and better demographic enrichment. The new and improved identity graph leverages advanced AI by clustering and scoring identities. 

Now with detailed demographics, incorporating life events and interests, the identity graph provides buyers and sellers with tools to create highly relevant and engaging campaigns. The expanded reach allows for more personalized content and improves the overall quality of consumer insights. 

We spoke with Michael Schoen, EVP and Head of TruAudience marketing solutions at TransUnion about the company’s new identity resolution product, how they’re building the future of addressability, and how it can benefit advertisers and publishers alike.

Yakira Young: With the identity graph now covering 98% of the U.S. adult population, how does this extensive reach impact the accuracy and effectiveness of targeted advertising for publishers?

MS: The TransUnion identity graph’s 98% coverage ensures widespread reach for users, significantly improving precision and effectiveness. As a unified, offline-online identity graph, we can connect together a wide variety of consumer touchpoints and enable the measurement of media tied to conversions. 

With an impressive persistence rate of 99.5%, it offers a dependable perspective on individuals, enhancing the accuracy of targeted efforts. Publishers who leverage TruAudience marketing solutions receive increased access to marketable phone numbers and targetable IP addresses.  

YY: Given the surge in IP addresses and device IDs linked to U.S. households, what new opportunities does this open in terms of personalized content delivery and monetization?

MS: The increase in data presents new opportunities for businesses to customize delivery more precisely, leading to more relevant content across different devices. Richer data benefits advertisers and content creators by enabling more effective audience segmentation. This deeper engagement enhances user experience and creates opportunities for effective monetization with genuine customers.

YY: Can you explain how the advanced AI used in TransUnion’s upgraded identity graph enhances identity resolution and demographic enrichment for ad tech purposes?

MS: TransUnion uses advanced AI in a four-stage methodology. 

1. The process begins with the collection of consumer data. 
2. Followed by the application of matching algorithms to eliminate duplicates and establish a unified view. 
3. The AI clusters data into individual profiles and households, offering a thorough understanding of consumer behavior. 
4. By scoring identities based on data reliability, the enhanced identity graph attains heightened scale, precision, and effectiveness in ad targeting and the delivery of personalized content.

YY: TransUnion’s collaboration with The Truthset Data Collective seems to underscore a commitment to data accuracy. How does this partnership enhance the reliability of data used in ad targeting?

MS: TransUnion’s partnership with The Truthset Data Collective highlights our commitment to accurate data for ad targeting. This ensures that advertisers have a reliable foundation for targeting strategies and improved precision in reaching the desired audience. 

TransUnion remains dedicated to high accuracy levels and transparency, as seen through the exposure of linkage scores to customers. The verification of the graph by Truthset, along with its application in critical areas like marketing measurement, fraud, and compliance, strengthens the accuracy of its performance. 

This partnership also helps us identify areas for improvement, where we can iteratively improve our methodology or bring in incremental data sources.

YY: Looking towards the future, how does TransUnion plan to evolve its identity graph to keep pace with emerging trends and technologies in the ad tech space?

MS: TransUnion is adjusting its identity graph to navigate changes in the ad tech landscape, especially with the upcoming removal of third-party cookies in Google Chrome. The company is dedicated to a privacy-first marketing approach for scalability and precision without third-party cookies.  

Our approach is anchored on using multiple identifiers and cloud-based integrations for identity translation, interoperability, and activation. These efforts address security, privacy, and governance concerns to meet challenges from evolving privacy trends, legislation, and emerging technologies. The identity graph will evolve in alignment with changing needs, emphasizing streamlined processes for improved efficiency.

The post Targeting Precision Reaches New Heights with TransUnion’s Identity Graph appeared first on AdMonsters.

These days the road to success as a publisher depends on who you ask as every publishers journey is unique, but there are lessons we can all learn from those navigating the twists and turns successfully. At AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO on September 26, our own Lynne Johnson facilitated a panel discussion titled “The New Publisher Playbook” with two industry leaders – Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer, TIME, and Zack Sullivan, Chief Revenue Officer, Future. They offered insight about a world without cookies, scaling your business and the future of privacy. 

In a Cookieless Environment, Building Relationships is Key

The ops industry is moving into a future where having the right data will be key to profitability. Industry professionals previously used third-party data, but that strategy must be amended with changing privacy laws. Direct relationships with consumers and partners will be crucial as we advance. 

Commerce is a huge part of Future’s business, according to Sullivan. The company’s proprietary tech stack is utilized to track users across their journey to illuminate their intent and path to purchase. Having this data about users and their intent is extremely useful. 

“We’re also audience builders. The audience gives us value – we build the brands, they come, it’s a self-perpetuating relationship. The more they come back, the better understanding we have of what they’re doing. Having that relationship is something that only media owners can do,” explains Sullivan. 

He adds that reliance on third-party data has led to newfound problems with attribution. Future is building relationships with media owners to close the gap between campaign buying decisions and their outcomes, increasing transparency along the data journey. 

Howard says that TIME has multiple business models, including B2B, B2B2C and B2C, which makes data more complicated, says Howard. “What ends up happening is you get a data and analytics loop that allows you to understand the different behaviors, the audiences, and the experiences you’re building within the overall framework. That then helps us inform both the user experiences and some of the editorial experiences that they’re going to help us continue to propel forward,” he shares. 

To help understand all of its data, TIME will soon announce a new attribution measurement platform. This platform will create a more holistic story of the data while separating data into buckets of TIME’s various audiences. This will help highlight the outcomes of both campaign and impact metrics that will quantify a return on investment and put the company in a better position to help its partners. 

To Scale or Not to Scale… And How?

Most publishers are now facing the challenge of whether to scale their business and how. This is an evolving issue but best practices have begun to emerge. 

Sullivan says Future can deliver its partners a large portion of their desired addressable audience using its data solutions. “Internally, we’re increasingly looking at using probabilistic data, then saying, ‘Here’s our first-party data. This is why we’ve got really high confidence in probabilistic matching.’ I think things like cleanrooms don’t scale up at a level that’s good enough right now,” he explains. 

Working alongside other publishers will also be a big piece of the data puzzle, for example, by having agreed upon taxonomies at different data levels since there is currently no standardization with taxonomy. 

This is where partnership comes in. “If you’re an agency planner, you want to avoid having  to publish and plan across 15 different specialist brands. You want to be able to say, ‘I’m targeting these cohorts and these taxonomy segments,’” says Sullivan. 

Whether or not to scale has been a question the industry has gone back and forth on for some time now. Howard notes he believes there’s a way for publishers to unite to tackle this issue, not necessarily by forming a coalition, but to share best practices on big issues and go-to-market strategies. 

Painting a Picture of the Consumer in a Privacy-Centric Era

As we move into an era where privacy is paramount, we must find new ways to understand online consumer behavior. One solution to getting a clear picture of individual consumers is identity graphs. 

A big piece of this puzzle will be the value the consumer gets in exchange for giving you their personal information. Sullivan notes that the detail you collect on users depends on the end goal. For example if you are hoping to drive digital subscriptions, you will need more robust data, but at some point, there are diminishing returns. He advises striving for balance. 

Howard says that TIME recently decided not to put any of its content behind a paywall, which makes collecting first-party data more difficult but is ultimately in line with TIME’s overall goals. 

Sullivan adds, “We need to determine what data we make available through an open auction RTB environment versus what we want to share into trade marketplaces? That’s the future.”

Attention metrics are also gaining traction as the latest way to track behavior, which Howard says will be the jumping off point to even greater metrics. These can be more directly attributable and will help direct sales outcomes. He says, “Attention is just the next step in the progression of data sophistication and what we can provide. And I think it’s the gateway into a whole new ecosystem.”

No one has all the answers, but industry experts will increasingly need to band together and share best practices to ensure continued success and growth.

The post The New Publisher Playbook: Understanding Challenges & How To Overcome Them appeared first on AdMonsters.

Publishers are overlooking their biggest opportunity as the third-party cookie slowly slips away.

Sure, a first-party data strategy is paramount for monetizing traffic once the cookie crumbles, but publishers should also be thinking long-term about how to position themselves to deliver on identity — and drive stronger demand for their audiences, both on and off their O&O properties.

Entertainment site, Fandom, took their head out of the sand long enough to get a jumpstart on their first-party data program and is now reaping unexpected benefits across the company. On Monday, August 23, Mike Racic, Global Head of Programmatic and Data, Fandom will join Jake Abraham, President, Audigent, and Rob Beeler, Chair, Advisory Board Admonsters will talk about Fandom’s Data Monetization Transformation at PubForum Vail, Monday, August 23, 2021.

Leading up to the event, we spoke with Mike Racic, Global Head of Programmatic and Data, Fandom, about the importance of turning users into consumers or fans, working with the right partners on robust identity solutions to future-proof your business, and the disservice publishers do themselves by just thinking of first-party data for the purpose of direct segment monetization.

Lynne d Johnson: It feels like third-party cookies made publishers a little lazy, leading them to think of their audiences as users and therefore they stopped building relationships with them. And now that cookies are going away they don’t know as much about their audiences as they should, which puts them in a bind with advertisers. Can you talk about the importance of turning users into fans and how that scales?

Mike Racic: It’s a little bit different at Fandom as we treat all users/audiences as “consumers” or “fans.” So the more engaged they are with our content and the more value they see, the more they are open to sharing information with us that will enhance their experience on Fandom.

This will allow us to better serve our advertisers’ needs as well, where we understand how/what/when/where fans engage with us and how that can be applied to deliver optimal advertising campaigns for both the fan and the agency/brands.

LdJ: With mobile identifiers, 3P cookies, and IP address tracking all positioned to go away, publishers are really nervous about identifying and targeting users across devices. How are all of these changes going to benefit publishers in the long run?

MR: First and foremost, you have to be working with the partners that can deliver robust identity solutions well into the future because in the long run, it will lead to a deeper understanding of how consumers are engaging with us, what platforms they’re using, etc.

This will allow us to be able to better focus on developing and delivering the best user experience possible and optimizing our ad stack to maximize revenue. It will bring clarity and focus, which will allow all publishers to better plan for products and content. Basically, it forces us to control and understand how and where consumers are engaging with us.

LdJ: A lot of publishers are talking about first-party data strategies in terms of monetization, but there are so many other benefits to being able to use that data across a media company, especially as the worlds of martech and adtech converge, and content becomes King once again. What are your thoughts about this? And also, how does that change the game for publishers when we talk about data monetization?

MR: It would be a disservice to just think of first-party data from the lens of just direct segment monetization. That is just one part of the puzzle. There are a number of different areas that are equally as important and also have revenue implications.  Some examples are how you use your data to inform the type of consumers you are trying to attract to your property. Types of content, formats it should be in, personalization, etc. Not to mention having a deeper understanding of what engages them with you and advertisers.

Another area is audience extension. i.e. you might not have CTV or in-app, but if you understand how your audience engages with your property and what they do off of it, it opens up another potential revenue stream. So I would say first have a robust data strategy, where data monetization is one of the outcomes you want.

What actual form it takes and how big it can be is purely based on having strategies that encompass all pertinent uses of data (each publisher will be different). Additionally, having a strong partner like Audigent whose technology and data strategy can power our efforts has made a big difference in this rapidly changing environment.

Learn more about Fandom’s Data Monetization Transformation at PubForum Vail, Monday, August 23, 2021, 12:10 pm – 12:40 pm.

The post The Power of First-Party Data Beyond Direct Segment Monetization: A Conversation With Fandom’s Mike Racic appeared first on AdMonsters.

The origin trial ran in a limited number of markets including Australia, Brazil, India, Japan & the U.S. for ~0.2% of Chrome users. Beyond the small sample, the trial was unlikely to be representative of all Chrome users as it only ran in certain versions of the browser like Chrome Canary, which developers use.

Despite these limitations, as we have watched the trial unfold we learned a fair amount about how FLoC might work in the future such as how many cohorts there might be (34 Thousand), how many users would be in a Cohort (at least 2K Synced users) and how often the Cohort is calculated (every 7 days). 

Of course, Google solicited feedback on how the system could be improved in the future.  They gave a topline overview of this during an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting, and on the face of things these changes look small but they could be significant.

From Opt-Out to Opt-In

One of the big concerns about the FloC origin trial that ran in Chrome versions 89-91 was that sites that carried ads were automatically opted into the trial. Sites could opt out and some large platforms did notably, like Twitter and Amazon. 

That was to be expected given these platforms compete with Google for advertising but to avoid further fallout sites will not be automatically opted into tests in the future.

Stopping Fingerprinting

Another concern raised by Mozilla was a highly valid one: That by combining information about a device and its settings with a FLoC ID, an AdTech business could narrow down a Cohort to very few people. 

Google has suggested that as a remedy they might use a small list of defined topic groups (e.g. Arts & Entertainment) as opposed to 34K FloC IDs that could be observed in the origin trial. An approach with hundreds rather than thousands of groups obviously backs out to larger audiences making it harder to fingerprint devices.

Making Meaning Of Cohort IDs

The approach of having defined audience groups as opposed to Cohort IDs that AdTech makes sense of was informally discussed by industry experts prior to the FLoC origin trial. 

Beyond removing a vector for tracking it would have the added benefit that a user would be able to understand what groups they were in. They could even take themselves in and out of these browser-based interest groups. 

It sounds like this approach might give less scope for independent businesses to create products based on their understanding of what interests a Cohort ID has. If that is the case and interest groups do become somewhat commoditized this would perhaps benefit larger publishers like DPG Media (& others) who have a depth of first-party behavioral data that allows for a more nuanced segmentation, whilst of course allowing user privacy to be managed effectively.

Final Thoughts

Some have taken that Google is looking to iterate on FLoC as a sign of weakness or disorganization, others take a different view seeing it as positive that Google is listening and will iterate to better balance the interests of their users with the creators of the content their users consume. 

Regardless of your view here you’re likely wondering what will the technology look like in future FLoC trials? The truth is we don’t know, but certainly many see Google’s recent comments foreshadowing a shift away from Cohort IDs. We should find out shortly, the final proposals for showing relevant content and ads should be ready for adoption in Q3 2022 and the transition period kicks off in Q4 next year. 

But it is not just FLoC where Google will need to act quickly if they are to adhere to their current timeline, the Core Attribution API proposal may need to be refined in a very similar way once its origin trial ends and FLEDGE has yet to start its first test. The next 12 months will be very busy for Google and the industry at large as we finally get ready to transition away from third-party cookies in Chrome.

The post What We Learned From the FLoC Origin Trial appeared first on AdMonsters.

The reasons are many …. CafeMedia’s Paul Bannister outlines how difficult it’s been to get the user-tracking alternatives off the ground. 

Meanwhile, Mike Juang at Ad Age posits that buy-side pressure spurred the delay. 

This makes sense on some levels, as in our industry, buyers’ desires (and dollars) often drive some of the most disruptive shifts to the way things get done. (Remember everyone’s angst — and the ensuing product development chaos — surrounding the move to transacting based on viewability)? 

But Google’s shift away from deprecating the 3P cookie is coming in the midst of regulatory battles around whether the company has undue influence over content monetization and distribution on multiple continents:  

• There’s the JCPA Bill aimed at giving U.S. publishers “collective bargaining” power to broker better rev-share deals here 
• There was the fight in Australia to avoid paying news publishers for clips of their content that got displayed in search results 
• Not to mention the EU antitrust investigation that kicked off with a probe in 2019   

So while there’s definitely brand and media agency influence, might the timeline extension be part of a broader, long-term strategy to appease (or, potentially quash) some of the looming antitrust claims? 

That question sparks another train of thought:  

As regulators around the world become more cognizant of how Google’s decisions around search, data, and advertising impact everyone from media conglomerates to small and medium-sized businesses, to millions of individual users, they’re starting to hold the company’s proverbial feet to the fire. 

But outside of a Spotify battle over the “Apple Tax” in the EU, and the Epic/Apple fight here in the States, why aren’t legislators doing the same thing to Apple, whose updated mobile OS essentially hobbles everyone else’s ability to target and run effective ad campaigns — under the umbrella of protecting user privacy? 

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had that thought: 

You’re right, Jay … And they’re not doing it for the publishers’ (or mobile app developers’ sake, either). 

Perhaps Apple’s time on the regulatory hot seat will eventually come, and perhaps the various governmental entities around the world will rein Google in — but that doesn’t mean publishers can exactly rejoice. That’s the consensus from a few POVs gathered from around the industry:  

“Publishers are fed up with these whipsaw tactics from the walled gardens/browser companies. In the span of a few weeks, Apple and Google have initiated and delayed major initiatives that directly impact how publishers will operate. This is exactly why publishers should have control of their destiny and need independent and open technology to create a fair value exchange for their content. Living at the whim of these walled gardens is the definition of insanity. It’s time for publishers to think beyond the cookie to create targetable, measurable audiences that provide revenue, increase yield, and preserve consumer privacy.” — Eric Wheeler, CEO, 33Across 

“Given that this is the third major delay by Google, this is hardly surprising news. It simply underscores the difference between business models that rely on advertising – such as Google and Facebook – and those that don’t, like Apple. But, at the end of the day, this changes nothing for advertisers. Apple owns enough of the market that its new rules are the game we’re all now playing. Google is simply delaying the inevitable, but business owners don’t have the same luxury. The time to begin taking responsibility for managing your own data has arrived.” — Landon Ray, CEO, Ontraport

“Although Google’s announcement gives the industry more time, the clock remains ticking. This news doesn’t change how advertisers and publishers should approach a solution. Publishers still need strategies to develop closer relationships with their audiences to ensure advertising revenue streams in the long run. On the advertising side, they should keep incentivizing parties with sophisticated understandings of their audiences. This will create the sustainable ecosystem we need for the future: one that’s less dependent on the walled garden’s data monopolies.”– Dor Herskovich, VP of Revenue at OpenWeb

“We are not surprised by the FLoC announcement. That said, there’s a certain irony to the UK’s pressure on Google not to be too hasty in deprecating cookies since that’s where a lot of the anti-cookie privacy pressure came from in the first place.  Google wins either way.  We are still betting privacy will prevail, most consumers will not consent to cross-site tracking, and programmatic direct deal volume will continue to accelerate.  Technology will catch up to support both the programmatic ad ecosystem and consumer privacy in ways that benefit publishers and advertisers alike and prioritizes both above tech vendors in the food chain.”  — Doug Huntington, CEO, FatTail 

Ultimately, the conclusion is that the cookie is still crumbling and maybe, the Apple is starting to rotten. That means pubs still need to work to build businesses that aren’t dependent on any one platform or technology paradigm.

The post Crumbling Cookies and a Rotten Apple: A Rock and a Hard Place for Pubs appeared first on AdMonsters.

Increasingly, traffic is moving towards environments outside the browser, making the need for other types of identifiers all the more imperative. So perhaps folks shouldn’t be so alarmed over Google’s announcement to not replace third-party tracking cookies with alternative identifiers. Instead, maybe it’s time to welcome the challenge and start getting more creative about how we all plan for the future of digital advertising.

Along those lines, four ad tech CEOs shared their takes on what the cookieless future will mean for advertising strategies and which tactics professionals can use to avoid disruption and increase ROI with more effective datasets.

Paul Roberts, Founder and CEO, Kubient: Right now, we’re at the mercy of Big Tech, and unfortunately, Google is choosing to flex its muscles after we’ve already started to understand how to thrive in the cookieless world. Kubient recently conducted a survey that uncovered 1 in 3 respondents stated a lack of cookies is their major concern. 

But they should fear not as this only creates more opportunities for creativity and to hone in on the potential of direct buys. Advertising professionals will need to audit their current tech stack and weed out unnecessary partnerships that will no longer provide immense value to continue to engage with potential customers, companies. I foresee more direct partnerships starting to form between SSPs, DSPs, and overall more supply path optimization strategies, so advertisers are working with approved first-party data and insights. 

Frank Maggio, CEO and Founder, React: Cookies evolved in a world where media platforms served ads to anonymous consumers, and this anonymity led to a depersonalization that made it okay to track consumers.  

It’s time to step back and rethink HOW we advertise and explore what we can do to incentivize consumers to share more about who they are, what they like, and how they feel. Let’s protect, respect, and reward consumer data and attention — that’s how relationships are built!

Alon Leibovoch, CEO and co-founder, BrandTotal: Roughly 90% of an advertiser’s budget is spent on programmatic advertising. With the end of the third-party cookie and Google’s plans of not creating an alternative, this will hinder programmatic advertising measurement and performance, making it harder to reach audiences, and result in a painful loss of transparency for advertisers. Now, it’s on advertisers to make the industry relevant again, put hyper-targeting in the past and leverage the data earned through direct customer consent.

Nadav Shoval, CEO and co-Founder, OpenWeb: As Google’s news indicates, publishers and content providers have to establish deeply autonomous and private relationships with their audiences, so they will be able to create valuable first-party datasets in a privacy compliance way. Now more than ever is there a need for platforms, such as OpenWeb, that provide the ability to create an identifiable audience through registration, while simultaneously building and retaining first-party data and maintaining the utmost privacy.

The post Four Ad Tech CEOs Weigh In On Google’s Plans To Not Support Cross-site Ad Tracking appeared first on AdMonsters.

Ad platforms spent the 2010’s rapidly innovating new ways to target, personalize, and measure advertising, largely based on third-party (3P) tracking. Money poured in from advertisers and agencies looking to shed the waste and uncertainty of traditional media and optimize campaigns right down to the user level.

However, during this exuberant period, advertisers, agencies, and tech platforms were unknowingly digging themselves into a debt that will take years to repay. And this debt can’t be settled by signing a check and swapping out for new tech.

Finding ways to manage the complexity of digital advertising without 3P tracking is putting urgent emphasis on people and process over tech, resetting the tech/agency/client relationship, and generally acting as a forcing function for the industry to clean up long-ignored problems.

3P Tracking—Ad Tech’s Miracle Drug

Digital marketing and advertising are currently running out of easy answers to old problems. One of those “easy answers” was 3P behavioral tracking. I don’t think it can be overstated the extent to which digital advertising molded itself around 3P tracking and the idea that tech platforms could freely collect and access data on user behavior across websites and apps.

The “God’s eye view” that 3P tracking enabled was hugely powerful. It gave birth to retargeting, multi-touch attribution (MTA), audience onboarding (e.g., LiveRamp), dynamic creative optimization (DCO), data management platforms (DMPs), and performance-based media machines like Criteo, Rocket Fuel, and Conversant (to name a tiny handful). Basically: most of 2010’s ad tech.

People and Process Must Rapidly Shore Up Growing Gaps

The convenience of tech masked deficiencies in two other areas: people and process. As 3P tracking breaks down (and for other reasons I won’t get into here), the importance of people and process is going to get increasingly obvious. To illustrate what I mean, let’s consider the example of basic measurement and reporting.

Time was, 3P tracking could measure digital advertising events (impressions, conversions, etc) at a user level, saving everyone a lot of hassle. Campaign setup, ad trafficking, and underlying data (e.g., ad server logs) could all be a complete mess, but as long as user IDs were present for purposes of de-duplication and tallying, brands and agencies could gain a basic understanding of audience reach, frequency, and overlap, as well as performance attribution (remember: cross-site/app/device view-through attribution is only possible via 3P tracking).

However, if you dig deep enough, you find that growing gaps in measurement and reporting caused by the death of 3P tracking are going to require people- and process-based solutions as much as tech-based ones.

If You’re Reading This, Your Data is Probably a Mess

The underlying data for digital ad campaigns indeed was (and still is) a complete and total mess. In May 2020, the UK’s ISBA released its Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study conducted with the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Problems with programmatic media data access, quality, and standardization meant that over the course of fifteen months and massive budget overruns, PwC could only match and audit a shamefully low 12% of ad impressions (to be clear: the “shameful” part is not directed at PwC).

The ad industry was rightly scandalized over the 15% “unknown delta” in supply chain costs that PwC could simply not account for, but having spoken to PwC directly about the study, I can tell you that the team involved was somewhat surprised and disappointed that the industry and trade media seemed to overlook a fresh reminder of how deeply broken advertising data is.

In other words: forget about the “unknown delta”—practically any kind of meaningful direct analysis is still near-impossible for most brands because the data sets aren’t standardized and in many cases are extremely difficult to access in the first place.

Clean Data is Going to Matter a Lot Going Forward

Let’s revisit the problem (or one manifestation of it): without 3P user IDs to reconcile ad impressions and events across time, users, websites, and apps, a brand could show an ad a million times to one person or once each to a million different people.

This is an exaggeration, but without 3P tracking, brands won’t know precisely; they’ll need to model it based on available data and make educated guesses. This is totally a thing. AppsFlyer is doing this, as is Google’s Display & Video 360.

But you can only build reliable models on top of clean data. Because brands’ tech stacks won’t be able to reconcile user IDs, suddenly a brand’s walled garden, publisher, agency, and tech partners will need to adhere to some new set of shared data standards; a “common currency” to take the place of user IDs.

And here’s the rub: this common currency does not exist yet (just ask PwC), so brands will need to create these new data standards, get agencies to use them, and make sure they’re implemented in tech stacks.

Resetting Campaign Data Back to a Baseline (and Repaying the Debt)

Now that we’ve established what “broken” looks like, we can start to sketch out what it would take across people, process, and tech to reset advertising data to a new baseline that’s adapted to a world without 3P tracking:

1. gain access to your digital advertising data (process)
2. develop new data standards and instructions on how to use them (process)
3. get all your media buying agencies to use these standards consistently (process)
4. make sure anyone with “hands-on keyboard” (agency or in-house) knows how to use the standards consistently (people)
5. make sure all your tech (agency or in-house) reflects the standards (tech)
6. collect your now-standardized data in one place for reconciliation, analysis, and reporting (tech + process)

Beyond Step 6, you can use your imagination. Once an advertiser can reset to a new baseline, many of the same use-cases formerly enabled by 3P tracking still apply, including media planning & targeting, creative optimization, and performance measurement.

Two caveats: This was over-simplified for purposes of illustration and 3P tracking is only one factor among many forcing change in the digital advertising industry.

My point was not to pinpoint the death of 3P tracking as the sole catalyst for change or the sole source of “debt.” Instead, my aim was to explore why and how brands, agencies, and tech ought to follow the “domino effect” as far as it takes to build genuinely durable solutions to industry-wide challenges.

The post Third-party Tracking Got Advertisers Deep Into Debt; Now It’s Time to Repay appeared first on AdMonsters.

Since then we have seen counter-proposals from independent AdTech companies—like SPARROW from Crtieo and PARRROT from Magnite—amid slow progress during discussions at the W3 Consortium and little progress on real-life models that can be tested in the wild.

On January 22, 2021, Google announced plans for its “First Locally Executed Decision over Groups Experiment” or FLEDGE for short. The announcement on Github describes how they will operationalize TURTLEDOVE for a first test.

Primer On TURTLEDOVE

You’ll recall that for TURTLEDOVE advertisers put snippets of code on their site that assigns users to an Interest Group, for an automotive company think Hatchbacks or SUVs etc.

These snippets of code replace the third-party cookies that advertisers can no longer use. That a user is assigned to a given interest group is only stored in their browser.

TURTLEDOVE envisages ad calls for these interest groups being sent at random intervals with responses stored in the browser,  publishers would then be able to compare bids solicited when a user visits their site against the best responses that had been stored in the browser via an API. The browser would then serve the most appropriate result, with results being sent back to the publisher ad server and DSPs or other intermediaries within the ecosystem.

The FLEDGE Documentation

The FLEDGE documentation provides significant detail on the key stages of the first TURTLEDOVE including:

1. Storing Interest Groups & updating them.
2. On-device auctions.
3. On-device bidding.
4. Ad Rendering
5. Reporting

It is likely they’ll be processes in the FLEDGE that do not make it into future tests (anyone for SLEDGE?) or indeed the final version, equally it’s likely there are features that will appear in future versions of the TURTLEDOVE not in the first test, indeed this is something called out in the Github documentation.

Storing Interest Groups In Browsers

Chrome will keep track of the interest groups it has joined and it will store information about who owns the group and who can advertise to these interest groups.

A number of different types of companies may become an owner, the most obvious is an advertiser or their agent, here TURTLEDOVE is likely used to cover In Category (Read: remarketing) purposes, with FLoCs being used for general interest-based advertising.

Beyond advertisers, the FLEDGE documentation highlights that third-party adtech companies might own an in-market segment, or publishers might create and own an interest group of people who have read a certain type of content on their site. The FLEDGE documentation suggests some businesses would charge for the ability to target this list, so perhaps this is how data brokers will live on post the death of the third-party cookie.

The FLEDGE documentation highlights that a browser will remain in an interest group for a limited amount of time, 30 days unless the advertiser makes another call to it again at a later date to keep the browser in a given group.

It’s worth noting that Chrome will allow segments to be updated daily for interest groups with a sufficiently large number of people, e.g. at least 100 browsers.

Sellers Run On-Device Auctions

The Fledge documentation tells us that sellers run on device auctions It had very recently been suggested that Chrome would randomly make ad calls as a user browsed the web but the FLEDGE documentation shows that a seller will initiate the auction by invoking a javascript API on the publisher’s page.

Invoking this API will cause the browser to execute the appropriate seller and buyer “worklets” in the browser to run an auction for interest Groups.

It is likely that the on-device auction for interest groups will run alongside other S2S auctions be they contextual or powered by identity vendors like Liveramp or iD5. For IG ads the seller decides:

1. Which buyer may participate
2. Which bids are eligible to enter the auction
3. What the score of each bid is.

I am not entirely clear from the FLEDGE documentation in the first test bids on Interest Group ads will be compared to:

1. Auctions that are run outside of the browser e.g. contextual.
2. Auctions for ads from other sellers for interest Groups.

But the consensus view is that long term this will be done as per the Original TURTLEDOVE proposal with the adserver passing the winning ad from their adserver to the browser via an API so the winning ad can be compared to the bids from the on-device auction for Interest Groups.

Bidding In On-Device Auctions

Interest groups can be bid on by their owners and agents of the owner in on-device auctions that occur against standard auctions. When the buyer is sent a bid request by a seller for the on-device auction they will:

1. Choose whether or not they want to participate in an auction.
2. Pick an advert & enter it in the auction along with a bid price.
3. Metadata which the seller requires in order to score an ad.

The metadata accompanying the returned ad is not specified in the FLEDGE document so sellers and buyers (owners of the interest groups and their agents) are free to establish whatever protocols they want here, this may be an area where IAB style open standards makes sense long term.

Ad Rendering

When the owner of an Interest Group wins an on-device auction the browser renders the winning creative within a Fenced Frame. This is a mechanism that is under development for rendering a document in an embedded context so it is unable to communicate with the surrounding page. Another safety feature is Fenced Frames will not use the network to load any data from a server.

Reporting

When a winning ad has rendered in its Fenced Frame on the publisher’s site, the seller and the winning buyer each have an opportunity to perform logging and reporting on the auction outcome. Chrome will also provide losing bidders with information about the auction clearing price so they can use this information to inform their bidding.

FLEDGE IRL

If any of this sounds too technical, I have a TL;DR FLEDGE explainer over on Twitter. Also, FLEDGE testing will be made available through origin trials in Chrome later this year, and ad tech companies will be able to use the API under a “bring your own server” model.

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