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.

Audience targeting and improved ad relevance are critical in today’s highly competitive media environment. With the rapid proliferation of digital content, advertisers and publishers face an unprecedented challenge in reaching and engaging their desired audiences.

That’s why this integration of Yahoo ConnectID with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) could not have come at a better time, particularly as the industry navigates the challenges of a cookieless environment.

This seamless integration allows publishers who have adopted LiveRamp’s ATS to unlock additional demand from Yahoo DSP, substantially improving the monetization of their addressable supply. “Demand-side interoperability has been a key feature, and now, with our expanded partnership, publishers can achieve greater scale and better monetization through Yahoo ConnectID,” explains Chandra Cirulnick, VP, Global Supply Partnerships at Yahoo DSP.

 By harnessing advanced identity solutions such as Yahoo ConnectID, marketers can accurately identify user preferences and behaviors in a privacy-centric way, ensuring their messages are delivered to the right people at the right time. This approach enhances user experience, drives higher engagement, and improves overall campaign performance.

How Yahoo ConnectID Boosts Audience Engagement and Revenue

The benefits are clear. Publishers leveraging Yahoo ConnectID have seen, on average, a 40% higher eCPM for Yahoo ConnectID impressions than those without it. Additionally, the win rate for advertisers and publishers is, on average, 34.3% higher when Yahoo ConnectID is available. For non-addressable supply, Yahoo Next-Gen Solutions provide on average, an impressive 76% higher eCPM and a 37.5% higher win rate. This dual approach ensures publishers maximize their revenue regardless of user authentication status.

Yahoo’s integration with LiveRamp’s ATS also future-proofs addressable advertising. By expanding Yahoo ConnectID’s footprint and refining its integration, Yahoo is committed to improving addressability for publishers and advertisers. The tech behemoth also plans on incorporating industry solutions like Google Privacy Sandbox, ensuring a robust and resilient identity solution strategy.

Powered by 205 million direct, consent-based consumer relationships in the US, Yahoo ConnectID leverages 200 billion daily cross-screen signals to build comprehensive user and household profiles. This depth of data allows for precise targeting and enhanced audience insights, enabling both publishers and advertisers to thrive despite the deprecation of third-party cookies.

Publisher Praise: Real-World Success Stories 

Publishers are already singing the integration’s praises. For instance, Dish Media has been able to extend advertisers’ reach. “Yahoo ConnectID empowers our advertisers to access new, potentially interested audiences across Yahoo’s extensive network, ensuring enhanced reach and effectiveness for their campaigns,” shares Andrew Tint, General Manager of Programmatic at Dish Media. Jeff Quandt, VP, Revenue Partnerships at Allen Media Group echoes that sentiment, highlighting that Yahoo ConnectID allows for a more tailored ad experience and better measurement of media investments.

Another notable example of publisher success with the Yahoo ConnectID comes from Philo, a programmatic-first television company. “The integration with Yahoo ConnectID aligns perfectly with our strategy and strengthens our connection with advertisers using the Yahoo platform, enhancing their ability to find their most valuable segments on Philo and deliver relevant ads to our audience. This capability to provide precise audience targeting and improved ad relevance is critical,” shares Aulden Kaye, Philo’s Head of Advertising Partnerships, when articulating the advantage.

These success stories underscore the broader trend of industry leaders leveraging advanced identity solutions to remain competitive. As ad tech evolves, the reliance on third-party cookies has become increasingly untenable, necessitating the adoption of innovative strategies to maintain ad efficacy. Yahoo ConnectID offers the agility required to navigate these changes, providing publishers with robust tools to address the impending demise of third-party cookies. By integrating such cutting-edge technology, publishers can maintain and even enhance their advertising capabilities, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the industry.

Setting New Industry Benchmarks for the Future 

The Yahoo DSP is committed to collaboration and interoperability to enable publishers and advertisers to effectively communicate and resonate with their audiences in a highly fragmented landscape. The tech leader’s ongoing enhancements and partnerships are positioning Yahoo ConnectID as a pivotal player in digital advertising, driving not only efficiency but also superior outcomes.

For publishers strategizing to future-proof their advertising operations and optimize monetization in a cookieless world, the integration with Yahoo ConnectID emerges as a strategic choice. The platform offers sophisticated identity resolution capabilities meant to significantly enhance audience understanding, campaign precision, and overall ROI. 

Learn more about this powerful tool here. 

The post Yahoo ConnectID’s New Integration Boosts Publisher Profits Without Cookies 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.

He came to Publisher Forum Nashville to share what he’s learned with other publishers and how he’s used that knowledge to prepare his media brands for the cookieless future. 

Wohl got his start in ad operations, and around 2012-2013, programmatic started picking up. He watched the transition of programmatic tech firsthand, including RTB, prebid, and client-side bidders from the very start. He got to see it all at a decent scale because, at the time, the company that birthed his career, Federated Media, bought another company called Lijit, which today is called Sovrn. 

As a publisher, Wohl constantly evaluates content strategy, traffic patterns, traffic sources, search performance, and all the things a publisher should be concerned about. However, at Sovrn, he sits parallel to leadership, where he advises on the continued development of ad management, now known as Sovrn Ad Management. He acknowledges that monetizing programmatic ads is a critical part of the publishing business and has made it his due diligence to hone in on that aspect. 

His team has coined him the post-cookie savior. Core to his role is figuring out how to keep making programmatic money when the cookie crumbles. First-party data is emerging as a solution. Before publishers start panicking about whether they have enough of it, they should closely evaluate the potential troves of it they have at their fingertips. 

How Cookies Stole Ad Tech

We constantly talk about the future of the cookie, but does anyone remember how we got here? 

If you’ve been operating programmatically, cookies were something that happened to publishers rather than something that they were actively participating in. Third-party cookies came from the buy side’s desire to learn more about people’s online behaviors beyond their own websites, and publishers were left out of this process.

The third-party cookie helps buyers serve people personalized ads. Primarily, it benefits buyers with the ability to retarget hopeful customers across the open web. But cookie-syncing causes latency within the programmatic pipes, slowing down auctions and potentially causing publishers to miss out on quality bids. Third-party cookies can also be used to create fraudulent purchases and page activity.

 While all this transpired, publishers were busy doing other things. Publishers spent their time evaluating inventory quality, focusing on their website’s speed, keeping up with click-through rates, and advancing ad viewability. 

So when Supply Path Optimization (SPO) came along, it grabbed the publisher’s attention. As did ads.txt and Sellers.json. These factors had publishers’ attention, but now publishers are scrambling to find cookieless solutions.

Since publishers’ heads were in other clouds for so long, they missed out on learning more about different behaviors, like user syncing and cross-site tracking, according to Wohl. The cookie ending means it’s over for these aspects as well. The end of third-party cookies has already come to Safari and Firefox, which means buying is only happening on Chrome. In Salon’s case, Wohl pointed out that he’s seeing less than half of CPMs from Safari compared with Chrome. 

The cookie apocalypse isn’t something we should wait for. It’s happening now. Instead of publishers wanting to get Safari CPMs where Chromes are, think about the reality: Chrome CPMs will drop to Safari lows by 2023. 

Bridging the Gap

In an open market programmatic world, cookies make inventory addressable for publishers. At the same time, Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) has become one of the go-to concepts that the industry is starting to wrap its collective head around as a cookie replacement. But in his keynote address, Wohl also reassured publishers not to sleep on Bid Enrichment. 

“As a publisher, what more information can you put into the bid request to send to the buy side to benefit the value of that inventory?” Wohl asked the publishers in the packed room. “It doesn’t just have to be Seller Defined Audiences. It could be things like viewability or contextual categories or audience segments.”

Wohl also highlighted the importance of the buy and sell sides being on the same page. For example, he watched Safari rates on Salon.com drop in 2020, and advertisers blocked anything COVID-related. He made it his goal to try and improve the value of his inventory. Still, if the buy side doesn’t adopt these practices, there is no point. 

 Publishers need to take the lead and start supplying the buy side with the best data that shows the value of their inventory. They need to focus on how many requests from all participants are necessary to get the correct information to the buyer, and exchange partners could help pubs accomplish this by creating scale.

“But I don’t have First-party Data”

Publishers often don’t fully realize the extent of the first-party data they have access to. It’s important to audit your data and determine exactly what you have that you can pass. We all have first-party data; we don’t know all we have and how best to use it. Here’s what Wohl suggests.

Contextual Categories: What’s on your page? As publishers, we can index our web pages first and use that information in what we pass to buyers. Page activity is critical; publishers can send that information out to buyers immediately without hoarding that data. Also, first-party data is built into the Wrapper, which means it can be a function of the bid request to grab contextual information and send it out. 

Newsletters: Once ID vendors said authenticated traffic was the way to access their responses, Salon grew its newsletter program to six different products. Now when users click, an email address comes through with it. So, even if people never sign up for your site, if they click through anything in your newsletter, it presents a source of authenticated traffic that we all have the potential to generate. 

User Profiles: This is information that users voluntarily give to a publisher. Some pubs even use their house inventory to run polls and ask users questions. This is another source of rich first-party data.

Behavioral Audience Segments: For publishers who can effectively leverage their first-party data on-site and off-site, audience segmentation is a viable path to increasing revenue. With the right analytics in place, publishers can build high-value advertising inventory. As well, Prebid adapters allow pubs to supply attributes related to their content and users, and then apply permissions so only certain bidders can access those attributes. 

How Can Publishers Better Connect With Their Readers?

As privacy regulations mount, it’s becoming increasingly important for publishers to create deeper relationships with their readers. For readers to give over their data, the value exchange must be clear and worthwhile. 

Wohl pointed out that the sell side could do more to better connect with their readers. These are just a few ways that publishers can advance their connections with their readers:

Alleviate sign-on friction with SSO: This is similar to the ease of capturing data with an email newsletter click, but in this case, you can grab a user’s email address if they sign in with SSO. Knowing where your traffic referrals are coming from, publishers can prompt users to sign in with that specific social media account. At Salon, they are building particular landing pages on the website that are tailored to the referral source. This way, if someone visits the site from Twitter, Salon can provide a user experience they are familiar with. If users come from Facebook, they can show them different content based on that particular traffic source. 

Return Readers – Showing consumers what they expect instead of what the publisher thinks is best allows publishers to capture data and build a relationship with their readers from the moment they sign on. Making the experience more personalized to each user will only bring them back to your website. Salon customizes user profiles of return readers; for instance, if a user is tired of seeing a certain amount of ads per page, Salon can alter that experience. 

Anonymize your Users: Publishers can use IDs and identity obfuscation to create anonymous user profiles. This enables publishers to let people sign in and trust that they are not revealing the user’s identity but rather the narrative, which includes factors like age and gender. 

The Category Frequency: Category frequency is about using behaviors for messaging your users. How do we connect with them better if a reader returns to keep reading food content? It will be a great idea to ask them if they want to sign up for a food newsletter. Suppose you have constant traffic from a person to an article by one of your journalists who also has a newsletter. Then it makes sense to let that person know that the writer has a newsletter they should sign up for. It’s essential to engage with people based on their behaviors.

The post A Post-cookie Survival Guide for Publishers – Tips From PubForum Nashville appeared first on AdMonsters.

Well, don’t worry, we got your back.

With our handy decoder ring, AdMonsters Decoder series decodes the latest terminology to enter the ad tech lexicon. This year, everyone was most concerned about privacy regulations, methods for uncovering incremental revenue, as well as what will be some likely alternatives to the third-party tracking cookie.

What Is Google’s New Chrome SameSite Cookie Policy?

Starting February 4, 2020, Under the Incrementally Better Cookies Policy, Chrome will treat cookies that have no declared SameSite value as SameSite=Lax, restricting the sharing of cookie data across sites. For external access, cookies will need to be set to SameSite=None; Secure and will have to be accessed from secure connections. Read more.

What Is Footer Bidding?

The more header bidding adapters you add, the more bids you get and the more money you might make. But, the more requests you make, the more your user experience suffers. Enter Footer Bidding. The idea is simple: Don’t call any ad requests until the page has fully loaded. Instead of getting the ads ready as early as possible, you do it as late as possible. The whole thing sounds quite counterintuitive, so you’re probably wondering why anyone would do that, right? There are several clear benefits, along with a few drawbacks. Read more.

What Is Email Hashing?

Since most people keep their personal email addresses forever, it’s easy to understand why many see the email address as the key to the future of digital marketing and advertising. It can identify audiences cross-device and is people-based in nature. This key to identity and marketing to people is what makes the email hash so important to publishers and marketers. They need to reach known people in a privacy-safe way, and email is the best tool for doing so. Read more.

What Is Google’s Privacy Sandbox?

As the clock ticks on the two-year expiration of the third-party tracking cookie, the advertising industry wonders how advertising tracking and measurement will work. Google has proposed a plan called the Privacy Sandbox, a series of APIs intended to provide users with privacy while ensuring that programmatic will continue to flourish. Read more.

What Is SPARROW?

In May, Criteo submitted SPARROW (Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver) to the W3C in response to Google’s privacy sandbox proposal.  In response to industry-wide feedback, SPARROW was recently updated to include reporting capabilities to further secure users’ privacy without compromising advertisers’ performance. We spoke with Charles-Henri Henault, VP of Product, Ads Platform and Analytics at Criteo to learn more about the proposal and the update. Read more.

What Is CPRA (CCPA 2.0) And Its Implications for Ad Tech?

The CPRA proposes significant amendments to the CCPA, with many of the proposed rules bearing similarities with those of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While there are many areas of the CCPA that would be updated, here Serafin Lion Engel, CEO of Datawallet, focuses on the amendments specifically important to the online advertising ecosystem, as the CPRA introduces rules meant to address the current ambiguity surrounding AdTech and Real-Time-Bidding (RTB). Read more.

The post AdMonsters 5 Best Ad Tech Explainers of 2020 appeared first on AdMonsters.

That’s especially true if it wasn’t you who called it quits. And if you have no interest in being single, you’re sort of thrust into finding someone new. That initial dating period can feel both exciting and intimidating, and also awkward and confusing. You were comfortable with your old boo, complacent even, and now you have to step up your game and put your best foot forward.

Worst case scenario: imagine being told you have only two years left for that relationship. A relationship with someone you grew to love over time, even though you knew they weren’t necessarily the best person for you. But you got used to the routine. You felt you understood them inside-and-out.

This is what it must feel like for many in the advertising ecosystem who relied on the third-party tracking cookie for advertising tracking and measurement for what seems like time immemorial. What’s worse, no one is quite sure how the alternatives will stack up—or even how to make sense of them.

Sure Google has opened up feedback for their Privacy Sandbox proposal and outlined potential uses—including ad selection, conversion measurement and fraud prevention—but there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what happens in the next two years once the third-party tracking cookie becomes extinct.

I recently penned an AdMonsters Decoder about the Privacy Sandbox after reading lots of documentation, following GitHub threads and even listening in on Lotame’s Fact Chief Briefing Webinar hosted by CMO Adam Solomon. And still, it all feels a lot like traveling through a dark, scary tunnel aided by a map containing a lot of hypothetical routes with no real, clear guide.

So to gain an even better understanding of what a cookieless world might look like and how Google’s Privacy Sandbox fits into all of that, I recently spoke with Michael Zacharski, CEO Engine Technology & EMX Digital. He believes Google’s Privacy Sandbox won’t drastically hurt digital advertising and its efficiency against other advertising mediums. He’s also certain that this will initiate positive actions that will build a trustworthy brand/consumer relationship.

Michael Zacharski, CEO of EMX

Lynne d Johnson: What is a privacy sandbox?

Michael Zacharski: The privacy sandbox is a sanitation filter between the browser and third parties that are called to interact with the browser on behalf of the publisher—either for advertising, measurement or other relevant services.

It controls what information can flow back from the browser to technology partners, such as those delivering ads. The goal is to give users more visibility and choices about what information is being sent back from their browser to third-party technology partners.

LdJ: What are the benefits of Google’s Privacy Sandbox?  

MZ: Google is doing the hard work required to ensure Chrome remains the dominant browser for the open web—addressing concerns related to data privacy and regulation by giving consumers visibility and choice related to data sharing with advertising partners. 

On one hand, Google is catching up to what other browsers have been doing on behalf of consumers, in terms of tightening which data can pass from the browser to advertising technology partners—but with little or no controls for consumers to make choices.

On the other hand, Google is providing the first two-way conversation through its sandbox, where consumers will be able to make informed decisions about their data and take actions related to data sharing.

LdJ: Will Google’s Privacy Sandbox negatively affect advertisers?

MZ: Google’s Privacy Sandbox is a step toward keeping the open web functional with consumer privacy in mind, but it is not being designed in a way to hurt digital advertising. It may restrict and challenge the norms of how things are done today, but that ties to the overall change in point of view regarding online privacy.

The restriction of third-party cookies is not something that is happening now—it’s happening in two years. Ad tech is an industry that was built upon rapid change and adoption, and in two years, the digital ad space will evolve. Data and measurement will be different, as will the trust dynamic between consumers and brands.

Google’s privacy sandbox is a step toward keeping the open web functional with consumer privacy in mind, but it is not being designed in a way to hurt digital advertising.

What won’t change is the fact that content is consumed digitally and digital advertising’s efficiency against other traditional advertising mediums.

LdJ: How will this affect the ad tech space? 

MZ: Two years is a lot of time in the advertising technology space, where things move, change and evolve quickly. We likely won’t see much disruption in the short term, but buyers will one day operate in a new environment devoid of the current deterministic data and measurement that they will have become accustomed to.

The two paths I see are deterministic targeting moving toward requiring hashed email or phone matches between content providers and marketers, as well as CRM and probabilistic targeting that does not touch personally-identifiable information but still provides relevant information about the location and context of the content being presented. 

It’s going to be a vastly different space in the long term, but the automation of advertising will continue, as will the convergence of traditional and digital media. As the industry moves forward, it’s going to be a mix of what is old and what will become new. Some efficiencies of measurement and accuracies of ad targeting may get watered down, but media pricing and available inventory will also shift. Prices for cookies will change but more inventory (the current non-cookie inventory) that is perceived as less valuable today will become more valuable.

Publishers and advertisers will reach a new equilibrium. In other words, ROAS will continue to improve directionally as publishers fill more inventory—but we will see some bumps along the way. At the end of the day, the coming changes won’t make digital advertising less effective of a medium or move things backward from the advancement made in programmatic advertising. The medium of digital advertising will continue to evolve, prevail and scale as this is where consumers continue to give their attention.

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The changes will roll out with the release of Chrome 80 and cookies that have not been declared with the appropriate settings—defining how cookies are stored and fired—will not be available for external access. This will immensely impact publishers’ ability to target their audiences for advertising and content recommendation purposes. Other external services like third-party widgets and social embeds will also be affected.

Certainly, this move brings greater transparency and privacy to users, safeguarding them and the websites they trust from exposure to attacks such as Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). Such attacks can occur when bad actors cause a user’s browser to perform a malicious request against a site they are authenticated on, like perhaps making a falsified banking transfer. Events like this can happen today because most sites don’t have secure SameSite Cookie settings in place.

But one has to wonder, how much it further cements the tech behemoth’s dominance in ad market share? (Those are concerns left for other conversations.)

What Is the SameSite Cookie Attribute?

The SameSite cookie attribute was first defined in 2016—with origins for the Secure Cookie Flag dating back to 1997—allowing for third-party cookies to be restricted to either a first-party or same-site context. So when another site tries to request something from the original site the cookie won’t be sent.

The attribute also limits the risk of cross-origin information leakage.

Let’s take it back to my earlier banking scenario. With the right SameSite Cookie settings in place, if I were logged into my bank; didn’t log out,  and then visited another site, then a CSRF baddie couldn’t use my logged-in state to make a malicious request for that bank transfer because they wouldn’t be able to access my cookies.

The SameSite cookie attribute originally provided two different methods for defining when and how cookies are fired—Strict and Lax. In strict mode, cookies can not be used cross-site. In the lax mode, there are instances where cross-site usage would be allowed, such as when it is a GET request and the request is top-level.

Chrome’s update will set cookies to the default state of Lax under the Incrementally Better Cookies Policy proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

SameSite Chrome Cookie Settings/Naming Conventions (MetaX)

What Are Chrome’s SameSite Changes?

Under the Incrementally Better Cookies Policy, Chrome will treat cookies that have no declared SameSite value as SameSite=Lax, restricting the sharing of cookie data across sites. For external access, cookies will need to be set to SameSite=None; Secure and would have to be accessed from secure connections (sites and web applications with HTTPS using the SSL/TLS protocol to provide the secure connection). Just setting cookies to SameSite=None will not enable them to be sent across sites unless they are also tagged with the Secure attribute, requiring that encrypted connection.

Publishers should update their cookies to ensure they are still collecting data from their cookies. Just go to chrome://flags in Chrome 76 (and above) and enable “SameSite by default cookies” and “Cookies without SameSite must be secure” to see how the changes will behave on your site.

It’s also time to start testing whether your vendors—measurement, SSP and exchange partners—have also updated their cookies. Just check if they’re missing the required cookie setting by looking for Developer Tools console warnings in Chrome 77 (and above). It’s better to get ahead of any reconciliation nightmares or revenue losses ahead of the game.

Access to third-party cookie data can make or break an ad tech vendor’s business, so it would behoove them to get with the program—post haste.

Mozilla already supports the new cookie standard in Firefox60 and Microsoft has plans to implement the update in Microsoft Edge 80. In ITP 2.1, Apple completely blocks third-party cookies and limits storage of cookies created on the browser to only seven days. Meanwhile, in ITP 2.2, cookies are kept for only one day.

On the Road to the Third-Party Cookie’s Demise

On the road to greater user privacy, Chrome also offers users ad transparency tools, that surface insight into why they are being presented with specific ads, how to block them and which companies are involved in the ad servicing process, like ad networks DSPs and SSPs. The ability to disable third-party cookies has been available to users for some time now.

And while Google does plan to end third-party cookie tracking in Chrome in two years, there is a plan to replace it with the Privacy Sandbox, a set of APIs intended to preserve privacy while still enabling some of the measurement and tracking abilities that third-party cookies now provide.

While Chrome’s initiatives are nowhere near as aggressive as Apple’s, it is a sign that the third-party cookie’s usefulness is dwindling fast and publishers need to look for alternative solutions.

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Those types of identifiers can be sorted into two groups, deterministic and probabilistic identifiers.

Deterministic identifiers are based on some kind of identifiable data—you know who this specific user is. These identifiers include log-ins and other registration data, and sometimes offline customer data or IDs, information the user and data collector have shared with each other. It’s possible to determine with certainty that this data relates to a particular user. There are some privacy concerns here, potentially—there may be personally identifiable information contained in deterministic data—but to ensure the user’s privacy, that ID will be coded into a long string of integers. Regardless, every time the user logs back into the site, on any device, the publisher or platform can recognize that individual user and tailor their experience accordingly. Deterministic IDs are, by and large, made up of first-party data the publisher or platform owns. Platform- or software-based deterministic IDs include Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple IDFA and Android ID. Prominent publisher-based deterministic IDs include Amazon, The Weather Company and AOL.

Probabilistic identifiers use a wide range of signals—sometimes hundreds—across multiple channels to build user profiles by matching anonymous data points with data from known users who exhibit similar behaviors. It’s hard or impossible to say who these data points pertain to, specifically—hence the name—but you know they have a profile that exhibits similar behavior to a known (deterministic) user, and you can use what you know about your known users to make assumptions or predictions about the user behind the probabilistic ID.

Probabilistic data points could pertain to browser version, ad serving processes, device type, time zone, shared IP addresses, JavaScript commands, piggybacked iFrames—everyday elements of the web that don’t point to any particular user, but that allow the digital ecosystem to function as it does. They normally don’t use email or registration data that might identify a specific user. Probabilistic IDs are created by algorithmically analyzing all of these regularly-occurring signals to build out cross-platform user profiles. Every provider of probabilistic IDs has their own methodology. Well-reputed companies that develop probabilistic IDs may boast 70%-95% accuracy, compared to deterministic IDs.

Probabilistic IDs are not as precise as deterministic IDs, but most publishers (unless you’re a Facebook, Netflix or something similarly massive) only have known, deterministic data on so many users. Plus, proprietary deterministic ID systems can’t read each other’s IDs across platforms. That can lead to, say, the same user appearing to an advertiser to be two different people, depending on whether they’re on Facebook or Amazon. Probabilistic data, then, allows for scale, and it also provides a means to map out behaviors across devices with limited or no reliance on personally identifiable information.

AdMonsters Resources

Take It to the People: LiveIntent’s Jason Kelly on Identity-Based Marketing (2016)

Probabilistic Identifiers and the Problem With ID Matching (2015)

AdMonsters Playbook: Cross-Channel Data (2015)

Fight the Fragmentation: Grasping Cross-Device Audience Behavior (2015)

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When a user visits a website for the first time (or the first time since the user has cleared their browser history), the site sends a cookie to the user, and it’s stored on their device by the browser. As such, cookies are browser-specific, so if you’re running Chrome on one device and Firefox on another, you’re dealing with two different sets of cookies. When the user returns to that site, the site reads their cookie, matches the user’s browser to the identification number stored in the cookie file, and may then edit the identifier to reflect information about the user’s behavior during that current visit. That information goes into additional name/value pairs in the cookie. All of this can help customize a user’s experiences on the site to their own preferences, and it can tell the site when it is or isn’t acceptable to send the user secure information.

A first-party cookie will share a domain attribute with the domain the user sees in their address bar. A third-party cookie will have a different domain attribute than whatever is in the browser address bar. Third-party cookies are used in content that comes to a website from an outside source, like an ad server, which allows advertisers to track information about a user’s browsing behavior around the web. In order to understand that two cookies from two domains pertain to the same user, those cookies need to be synced.

Session cookies are temporary, and last only as long as a user’s browser session does—while they don’t expire, they’re automatically deleted when the user closes the browser or leaves the site. Persistent cookies will remain in the browser beyond a single session, but they expire at a set time, usually no later than a few months out—the data will get old and become less useful beyond that point. Many users regularly clear their history, too, which flushes out any persistent cookies regardless.

One more thing about cookies: The oft-repeated line about cookies in mobile is that “cookies don’t work in mobile,” which is and isn’t true. More accurately, Safari comes with third-party cookies disabled by default, and apps generally don’t share user data with other apps. Those limitations (plus the fact that cookies really don’t work with connected TVs) have driven many players in the ad ecosystem to lean on alternate identifiers for users.

AdMonsters Resources

First-Party Data Playbook (2015)

AdMonsters Playbook: Cross-Channel Data (2015)

State of the Cookie (2013)

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