Sports Illustrated Joins Verizon Media as Third Publisher to Adopt Its Cookieless ID

Maven, the publisher behind brands like Sports Illustrated and TheStreet, announced this morning that it is adopting ConnectID, the first-party data solution created by Verizon Media in December, in order to offer audience targeting options to advertisers when third-party cookies disappear. The publisher, which has 120 million monthly users across its media brands, is the third external company joining the first-party data network, following Newsweek and Cafe Media. Other brands owned and operated by Verizon Media, such as Yahoo and TechCrunch, also use the technology, and more than 50 publishers have signed on to adopt the technology, according to the company. Verizon Media is one of the few players to operate on both the demand and sell-side of the programmatic advertising process. For publishers like Maven, this unique positioning is a selling point, Verizon's access to advertiser demand could potentiall lead to higher yield. “Verizon comes with its own demand-side platform, which is a huge advantage,” said Andrew Q. Kraft, the COO of Maven. “A lot of identity providers are technology providers, so it's up to the demand-side platforms to connect up and supply-side platforms to connect up.” Google Grants a Stay of Execution in the Death of the Cookie First-party priorities trump cookies The announcement comes at a period of uncertainty for publishers and advertisers, both of which are looking to navigate a post-cookie world whose expiration date keeps moving. Last year, Google announced its plan to phase out third-party identifiers from its widely used Chrome browser by 2022, which sent the media ecosystem scrambling to build solutions centered around first-party data. In June, Google announced it would delay the disappearance of cookies until 2023, under the oversight of the U.K. markets authority, giving the media industry more time to adjust. Rather than delay the inevitable, publishers and advertisers are moving forward with their first-party data solutions, with each hoping to build the system that gains widespread adoption. The Washington Post introduced its first-party data platform, Signal, last November, while Vox debuted its version of the technology, Forte, in September. Both have used the tools to entice other publishers to their networks. For many of these publishers, the choice is binary: zero or something.—Iván Markman, chief business officer, Verizon Media Using ConnectID, advertisers can buy, measure and optimize ads, while publishers can manage, monetize and navigate audiences, all without third-party cookies. Readers who visit ConnectID-enabled sites will be asked to register and consent to sharing their personal data for advertising purposes, though the publishers' audiences remain distinct: Sports Illustrated cannot use the first-party data of a user who has only consented to give their data to TechCrunch, for instance. However, thanks to the size of Verizon Media––it reaches 85% of the U.S. population––the overlap between its visitors and other publishers' visitors is considerable. Verizon Media also captures "hundreds of billions" of signals from its users, said Iván Markman, its chief business officer, ranging from sports preferences to finance, lifestyle to commerce. It uses these signals to build out profiles of its users, called "people graphs," that are not tied to cookies. As a result, where other first-party data solutions are often deterministic or probabilistic, Verizon Media does both. The choice is a binary Verizon Media reaches 148 million deterministic logged-in users monthly, according to Markman, and its size is a key part of its appeal. A deeper audience pool attracts larger advertisers with bigger budgets to spend, and publishers want to be wherever advertiser interest is. However, even with its massive audience, ConnectID does not perform dramatically better or worse than cookie-based advertising, Markman said, calling them "equivalent." Instead, Maven has embraced the technology as a reliable option amidst a field of uncertainty, as it is far more effective than the post-cookie alternative: nothing. “For many of these publishers, the choice is binary: zero or something,” Markman said. “Nothing is going to be 100% until there are new forms of adoption.” Plus, even though the death of the cookie has been prolonged, the industry has already experienced “partial cookie-death,” Kraft said. Publishers are unable to use cookies to track readers on Safari and Firefox, which leads to lower CPMs on those platforms. “We need to reach those users today, and the Verizon ID lets us reach them today,” Kraft said.