As we can all attest here in early 2022, cookie fatigue is real. And not just because we’ve been eating our feelings throughout this never-ending pandemic.
When it comes to the deprecation of third-party cookies, everyone in the ad-tech world is quick to join the conversation. But to what end? How many players are actually roadmapping and testing solutions rather than just talking in circles?
Addressability—the capacity for an entity to be identified and targeted—is the defining issue of our time. For many years, browser-based cookies did the work for us. Now the sun is setting on that era. Taking charge of addressability—assigning unique identifiers so customers can be tagged and targeted over a network while maintaining their privacy—will require ad-tech companies and organizations to be more proactive than reactive.
The stakes of addressability are high. Without a dramatic reimagining of this concept before Chrome deprecates cookies in the next 18 months, Google and other insiders believe that advertisers could lose half of their programmatic revenue.
The good news? Safari and Firefox are already operating without third-party cookies, giving us a perfect proving ground to build, test and improve identity solutions right now. Even better news? By combining a variety of existing and developing strategies, we can start ushering in this new era of advertising technology right away. It can be confusing, as all of this blends together in one coherent strategy, but here’s a helpful way to rank and evaluate in three tiers.
Gold: Logged-in users
The gold standard of first-party data will be users who log into a site—these are users that a publisher has the most intimate relationship with. If a reader logs in, it likely means that the publisher has obtained consent to serve personalized ads, is guaranteed a stable identifier and can begin creating first-party data. The publisher can begin learning that user’s interests based on their behavior or by directly asking the user. This is an incredibly powerful and long-lasting form of addressability.
But it’s important to note that the simple act of getting a user to log in is not enough to end your journey. This is just the entry point. Many key industry players miss this distinction because of email hash-based identifiers.
Oftentimes, these identifiers are conflated with first-party data—they’re an easy integration point and a great way to make logged-in users addressable to advertisers invested in the same technology. But at that point, advertisers are no longer using your first-party data. Instead, they are beginning to use their own data or are back to third-party data tied to these identifiers. Many publishers choose not to adopt these standards to protect the value of their own first-party data, rather than handing things back to third parties.
Silver: Semi-anonymous advertising
Not even the most engaging websites can get most of their audiences to authenticate. So how do we handle addressability for the rest of those anonymous users? Fortunately, there are ways of keeping them semi-anonymous, while still allowing publishers to begin generating first-party data.
Many users are not comfortable sharing their email addresses or any personal information and will likely never create a full account. However, there is still a world in which you can create a stable identifier with these users’ consent and begin collecting non-identifiable information about them.
If this sounds vague, that’s because it is: No one can say exactly what this semi-anonymous solution looks like yet. What we do know is that it will be a browser-compliant way of getting users to allow us to link them between websites.
This might be Google’s long-promised Privacy Sandbox. It may be accomplished via a consent management platform or through the Prebid Addressability Framework. Whatever the solution ends up being, it won’t match the effectiveness of those gold-standard, fully logged-in users—but it’s the next best thing, allowing publishers to slowly begin building anonymous reader profiles.
Bronze: Contextual advertising
The tier below these—and it’s a big one—consists of the vast swath of readers unwilling to consent to even a semi-anonymous form of addressability. To this end, contextual advertising is one of the most straightforward approaches.
Rather than the personally identifiable behaviors that can be compiled into first-party data, a contextual solution is what it sounds like: focused on the content of the website itself. Brands and publishers won’t be privy to precise user data from readers who aren’t addressable, but artificial intelligence and natural language processing can assist in narrowing down the topics and content likely to be of interest.
Someone reading about cooking playlists may be interested in buying a new speaker, a music streaming subscription or even concert tickets. Someone browsing no-bake recipes may be interested in new cookware, utensils or ingredients. Basically, the better you understand the content of various web pages, the more productively you can target their audiences by assumption.
GumGum’s sophisticated Verity tool is one cutting-edge product in this space that effectively crawls and analyzes website content for advertisers.
It takes all of us
With all of these various addressability strategies in the works, it’s not a singular approach but a multipronged approach that will produce the greatest impact. The digital advertising industry is undergoing the largest transformation in its history, and to emerge stronger after the cookiepocalypse will require a nuanced understanding of various solutions and the ways in which they intertwine.
Ad-tech companies should heavily lean into industry collaborations to cover all of the above bases. The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s Ramp ID are accessible, interoperable solutions ready and waiting to tackle these challenges.
A great way to stay on top of things is by joining the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which encompasses niche groups like the Improving Web Advertising Business Group and Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PAT-CG). The latter was launched exclusively for collaboration and development of the addressability technology that will safeguard user privacy on a changing web. Another way is through Prebid, an organization bringing together the best and brightest industry players to innovate and test addressability solutions.
Although the future is uncertain, and not all of these solutions have been fully realized, we have the resources, the innovative mentality and a generous timeline to tackle addressability in the new advertising era. Let’s stay ahead of the curve together.
