On January 4th, Google restricted third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users, with the aim for that to hit 100% by the end of the year. Any publishers that still have their heads in the sand can no longer afford to ignore the inevitable, but a cookie-free data diet is nothing to fear. In fact, it presents many opportunities, the question is where to start. Content Ignite’s CEO, James Hanslip, explains more…
Adapting to the post-cookie future is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s one that publishers have been running from for some time. The deprecation of third-party cookies is just one part of a broader paradigm shift in digital advertising and publishing, alongside privacy regulations and the restriction of personally-identifiable device signals as core pillars in the new normal.
Publishers feeling behind the curve should start educating themselves now by joining industry bodies, attending events, and putting aside competition for a moment to connect with peers. Smaller publishers — which are most reliant on open programmatic revenues and therefore most affected by cookie deprecation — could join forces in networks or collectives to boost audience scale and pool resources.
This is not a time for hasty decisions based on minimal data. Publishers should instead ensure they are conducting effective due diligence, keeping track of emerging technologies, adapting their strategy, and committing to solid data analysis before making their next move.
Explore the bustling market of alternative targeting solutions
The end of third-party cookies will not mean the end of targeted ads. There are several methods that allow publishers to continue to match buyers to audiences, but which is right will depend on resources, the data the publisher has at hand, and which advertisers are the best fit.
Alternative identity solutions allow publishers and advertisers to find matches between their audiences in the supply chain by leveraging consented first-party data. The challenge however is selecting from the more than 100 identity providers in the market. It might be tempting to plug in as many as possible, but this will quickly result in diminishing returns and wasted money. Publishers should split-test a handful of these solutions to see which drives the best performance, leverages the data they already have on users and are interoperable with other IDs and across channels to maximise reach.
Contextual targeting is another solution and predicted to have 13.8% annual growth. Contextual’s advantage is that it doesn’t rely on user data at all, meaning that non-addressable users can be served relevant ads. It does this by using the content itself, metadata, and anonymised usage data to infer the likely interests of the user visiting the page. This capability has been around in some guise for decades, but today’s AI-powered solutions automate what was once a laborious process of manually tagging content into categories. With contextual expected to hit big in the second half of 2024, now is the time for publishers to explore building a direct sales line through this approach.
Then there are data clean rooms and the broader data collaboration ecosystem, which allow two or more data sets to be compared to see if there is any overlap, without any being shared directly.
Finally, it is worth mentioning Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, including its anonymised, interest-based Topics solution. This will certainly be a major player in post-cookie targeting despite initial teething issues.
Publishers can play a key role in the post-cookie landscape by providing richer data points, like contextual, vertical, and IAB category data to enrich the bidstream for advertisers. Doing so will elevate their inventory for advertisers, allowing them to better target audiences without third-party data and improving their revenues.
Clean up supply chains with AI-powered demand path optimisation
The post-cookie landscape presents publishers with an opportunity to assert greater control and be more fairly compensated for their high-quality content and advertising experiences. Demand-Path Optimisation (DPO) will be vital for this.
DPO can arm publishers with insights into the flow of bids and allow them to identify the best buyers, analyse bids, assess ad quality and maximise revenue. In addition to its role in strategic decision-making, DPO improves site latency and user experience by filtering out low-quality buyers, while also resolving the brand safety headaches of inappropriate creative appearing on a publisher’s site.
The barrier to rolling out DPO is the sheer quantity of data that needs to be processed and analysed — both retrospectively and in real-time — in order to be effective. But this is all set to change as AI rapidly improves in capabilities, carrying out data crunching that would have once been time and resource-intensive in mere seconds. AI-powered DPO can serve as automated gatekeepers of the programmatic supply chain, cleaning up the pipelines while leaving the human professionals at either end free to focus on big-picture strategy.
Third-party cookie deprecation may have turned the digital publishing world on its head, but it is also an opportunity. With ubiquitous access to individual data a thing of the past, first-party data and direct audience access are more valuable than ever. Publishers offer both in troves and those that are smart about how they leverage their unique assets will emerge stronger than ever.
James Hanslip
CEO, Content Ignite
About: “Maximising Revenue, Efficiency, And Control For Publishers Through One Simple Integration”: Content Ignite’s innovative approach centres around Fusion, our cutting-edge advertising technology platform which gives publishers complete control over on-page monetisation, ad technology, and ad management, through one tag. With Fusion, digital publishers now have the power to effortlessly optimise, strategise, and elevate their business, with unparalleled performance.
