How Trusted Media Brands Is Getting Advertisers to Ditch Third-party Cookies

Like a lot of publishers over the last 18 months, Trusted Media Brands, home to titles like Reader's Digest and Taste of Home, has grown ad revenue thanks to investments in first-party data. Now, it's using first-party data to increase deal size, win more pitches and move brands from relying on third-party data to using its own. The upshot is a 140% increase in revenue from deals using first-party data, year-over-year. Based on the progress in the first half of 2022, it's on track to double that, the publisher said. It wouldn't share specifics. “We are having educated conversations with buyers saying, ‘What you’re doing won’t work a year from now,’” said Stephanie Mazzamaro, vp, data product and operations. “If what we’re seeing is accurate, we can move you to a programmatic guaranteed deal, we can provide deeper insight.” With cookies on the wane, publishers are looking at how to mitigate revenue loss in the open exchange in privacy-safe ways. For TMB, identifying where ad buyers can save money with them by moving to programmatic guaranteed channels makes sense. But, there are obviously limits for agency ad buyers with publishers’ individual data products. With the Cookie Crunch Nearing, Vox Media Flexes Its First-Party Muscle Fishing in the open exchange TMB, with the help of its data management partner, Permutive, is accessing data points around campaign performance and revenue won in the open marketplace—to identify potential clients that it can move to its own programmatic guaranteed channels. It’s letting us have educated, data-driven conversations with buyers who previously wouldn't have given us the time of day.Stephanie Mazzamaro, vp, data product and operations, TMB “A key initiative for us in looking for a DMP was how to mitigate revenue loss in the open marketplace when cookies go away," said Mazzamaro. For one tech brand, TMB found it was overspending by 65% for some audiences, due to certain campaigns running on cookie-blocked inventory. The brand is now recommending TMB for its next planning cycle. The publisher runs weekly reports on the open exchange with benchmarks of what CPMs brands are spending. It sends these to its sales team to put together packages for potential clients, moving their spend from a non-guaranteed to guaranteed environments. “It’s letting us have educated, data-driven conversations with buyers who previously wouldn't have given us the time of day,” Mazzamaro added. A growing number of publishers and platforms are offering data around trending topics, trending behaviors and personas, since the upcoming loss of signals will make understanding their inventory relevance with marketers’ audiences more difficult, said Delphine Hernoux, chief data and analytics officer at GroupM agency Wavemaker. “It may help publishers to continue demonstrating the value of their inventory. It may also help marketers and agencies to make informed decisions,” she said. “But marketers and agencies will continue to refine their decisions based on outcomes and not based on insights.” Growing the audience size Since sharing deeper insights with marketers about its audience, TMB's request for proposal win rate has grown by 31%. Now, 94% of direct-sold campaigns use first-party data. Further, deal size doubles when first-party data is included, versus when it’s not. Areas where it’s still using third-party data are where advertisers are holding on to specific third-party data sets. In the pharma sector, especially, some clients rely on third parties to measure conversion. For one pharma client that historically did so, TMB saw an increase in conversion of over 31% by using its first-party data. These financial gains are thanks to growing the scale of its addressable audience segments—currently, 52% of visits come from Safari and Firefox, already cookie-blocked inventory—compared with its previous data management system. In some segments, this has led to a four-times increase in audience size, in others, up to a 22-times increase in audience size. After refining a smorgasbord of taxonomy—from its some 16 titles across sectors—to match every tag in the CMS, the publisher currently offers over 2200 audience segments. Using its data tool TI360, assessing some 250 data signals per page, it can tell buyers information like pet lovers are 10 times more likely into buying household cleaning supplies, for instance. For TMB—and others—the goal is to grow its authenticated audiences, through tactics like newsletters and subscription boxes and apply these data products to its streaming channels. As buyers try and navigate a patchwork of alternative identifiers, “everyone is plugging and playing right now,” said Mazzamaro. And while there's ongoing uncertainty ahead, when Chrome does finally deprecate third-party cookies, TMB expects an initial dip in CPMs and transaction volume in the open marketplace, before it levels out. “No one will stop using programmatic channels to buy,” she said. Prebid, of Header Bidding Fame, Sees Its Ranks Swell as Publishers Seek Shop Talk