Yahoo Introduces Its Cookieless ID, Next-Gen Solutions

The looming deprecation of the third-party cookie has created a market opportunity for savvy ad technologists—and Yahoo hopes to capitalize on it. The company, which operates both a demand-side and supply-side platform—as well as editorial titles like TechCrunch— announced the debut on Thursday of its identity solution for non-addressable audiences, called Next-Gen Solutions. Yahoo began road-testing the product on in-app environments last summer, but it will now be available on the open web. Next-Gen Solutions aims to let marketers serve relevant digital ads to website visitors in a cookieless environment where first-party data is unavailable, making these users impossible to target. Privacy-minded measures, such as the looming elimination of third-party cookies and the discontinuation of IDFA, have made it harder to target audiences online. While only about 30% of ad opportunities today lack user identification, Yahoo expects that percentage to rise to 75% by 2024, said its chief business officer Iván Markman. The increase creates a critical need––and potentially lucrative opportunity––for any technology that improves the relevancy of non-addressable inventory. "Once third-party cookies disappear, the vast majority of web users will be non-addressable by conventional means," said Adprofs founder Ratko Vidakovic. "Creating alternative methods to make audiences addressable is absolutely necessary for the economic future of the web." BuzzFeed is the Latest Publisher Adopting Yahoo’s Third-Party Cookie Replacement The offering is the latest ad-tech product that aims to provide marketers and publishers a viable means of serving relevant ads in the absence of third-party cookies or first-party party data. Yahoo, given its status as both publisher and ad-tech provider, stands uniquely positioned to see both sides of the fence. In early testing on the web, publishers that adopted the identity tech saw spend on their non-addressable inventory increase by over 25%, Markman said, as the more data attached to an impression, the higher the price. For advertisers, Next-Gen Solutions increased incremental reach on non-addressable web inventory by 40%. “When it comes to Next-Gen Solutions, we tend to think about the landscape in terms of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots,’” Markman told Adweek. “The haves are those who have first-party data, consumer trust and consent and the have nots are the ones who don't. And when we think about the future, we believe that we need to have solutions for both.” Checking its answers against a truth set Next-Gen Solutions treats website visitors purely as single impressions and does not store any data about their activity, Markman said. Instead, it uses hundreds of data signals to assess visitors, including contextual information, such as the type of content they are consuming and real-time data, such as the device they are using, their location and the time of day. More importantly, Next-Gen Solutions uses a machine-learning algorithm to power these probabilistic determinations. Yahoo trains this algorithm with data it collects from publishers using its other identity solution, an ID-based product called ConnectID. Billed as the complement to Next-Gen Solutions, ConnectID uses first-party data from opted-in users across the Yahoo ecosystem. Critically, only marketers who have adopted ConnectID can use Next-Gen Solutions. Currently, 12,000 publisher domains, including BuzzFeed, The Arena Group (formerly Maven), CafeMedia and Chegg, have adopted ConnectID and over 1,200 advertisers are directly activating their first-party data with the solution. Cookie Alternative Device Fingerprinting Is Dealt Another Fatal Blow By training Next-Gen Solutions using information collected by ConnectID, Yahoo solves its inability to identify non-addressable audiences by comparing them to audiences it is able to identify. It's similar to creating lookalike cohorts, though it does so without collecting or storing any data about non-consented users. “Connect ID acts as a kind of cookieless truth set, and it helps anyone who has first-party data that can connect to connect it,” Markman told Adweek. “If you don't have that ability, it can still be used as a training set that helps ensure that Next-Gen Solutions is as precise and effective as it can be.”

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Yahoo Introduces Its Cookieless ID, Next-Gen Solutions, for the Open Web

The tech uses machine learning to inform its decisions

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