A few weeks ago, Experian and OpenX hosted a supply-side think tank at our New York City office. Over 70 industry leaders met to talk about targeting in a cookieless future and how we can reach consumers in intentional ways.
Publishers and supply-side partners shared what challenges they face, what solutions they’re considering, and what the future holds once the third-party cookie begins to deprecate in 2024. In this blog post, we’ll cover the top challenges, cookieless solutions, and actionable strategies we discussed at the event that can help publishers, their partners, and agencies make informed decisions about how to navigate tomorrow’s digital ecosystem.
Four main challenges
Four main challenges were discussed at the event:
First-party data monetization
Publishers possess a wealth of first-party data, but collecting and centralizing this information can be difficult for actionable insights. Streamlining data centralization and organizing first-party data is crucial for effective decision-making. Even with a wealth of first-party data, it’s important to be aware of any blind spots in your data and enrich those gaps with data partners rooted in offline connections.
“We appreciate the opportunity to participate in the supply-side think tank led by OpenX and Experian, two industry leaders in navigating a cookieless future. We’re excited to collaborate with them on testing privacy sandbox APIs, identity resolution products, and audience development tools to enhance creator monetization and support an open internet amidst rapid technological and regulatory shifts.”
Patrick McCann, SVP, Research, Raptive
Lack of authenticated data and persistent IDs
The deprecation of third-party cookies means there will be a shortage of authenticated user data and persistent identifiers. Without this information, targeting and personalization become more challenging. Participants discussed the need to find alternative ways to gather and use personal data responsibly. It’s time to start evaluating data partners who have accurate, multi-source compiled, privacy-compliant data with the dedication to reach and recency.
Fragmentation and scale with alternative IDs currently in the market
The multitude of alternative identifiers in the market poses a challenge for publishers. Each of these identifiers comes with its own set of rules and integration processes, leading to fragmentation and complexity. Publishers must find ways to navigate this landscape. Look to ID agnostic partners who provide a way to access multiple IDs at scale.
“The industry needs a more streamlined standard to integrate alternative IDs, given the ongoing challenges of third-party cookie deprecation, measurement, and clean rooms. This burden falls heavily on product and engineering teams, who must prioritize and address these issues one at a time.”
Ryan Boh, Head of Identity, Lockr
Time
Cookie deprecation is almost here. It is crucial to organize your legal, engineering, and product resources, and align internal go-to-market strategies. Establish partnerships that work with your team to follow these timelines and help build phased or cohesive strategies to prepare for a path to monetization. It is imperative to establish a sense of urgency and not wait for others to take the lead. Start testing now to determine if your infrastructure is ready and capable. Many partners who attended the think tank offered insights on how they’ve been tackling challenges to help their industry peers.
Solutions and action plans for a cookieless future
Participants discussed ways they are starting to prepare for a cookieless future and other approaches on their roadmaps:
Work with data partners heavily rooted in offline data across the ecosystem
Enriching your first-party data with partners who rely on offline IDs can help bridge gaps in your audience knowledge. This approach allows you to build a more complete audience profile while third-party cookies are still operational.
Experian is rooted in deterministic offline data and has decades of experience managing it safely. We have insights on over 250 million U.S. consumers and 126 million U.S. households. With our digital technology assets, we bring in 4 billion devices and 1 trillion device signals to definitively connect offline records to online identifiers. With Experian identity widespread adoption throughout the industry, we’re able to provide a common language for us all to collaborate. Experian identity organizes people into households, links their digital devices and IDs to them, enriches their identity with behavioral attributes, and then makes this data actionable in any environment, all while maintaining consumer privacy and data regulations.
“Experian’s supply-side think tank provided a platform for publishers and AdTech companies to discuss the challenges posed by cookie deprecation, privacy regulation updates, and identity restrictions. It highlighted the need for AdTech companies to assist publishers in addressing anonymous users without requiring a value exchange — fostering a mutually beneficial and privacy-compliant open web solution.”
Anthony Caccioppoli, Head of AdTech & Solutions, Insider
Develop your own persistent ID
Creating and maintaining a proprietary persistent ID can be a valuable cookieless solution. It provides control and independence in the new environment post cookie, giving publishers the ability to maintain a consistent user profile.
Use your data to expand contextual targeting opportunities
Contextual targeting involves placing ads based on the content of the web page rather than user data. In the absence of cookies, this strategy can prove effective in reaching relevant audiences.
“The masking or deprecation of IP addresses will eventually impact the availability of addressable IDs in non-authenticated web environments. In addition to ensuring maximum resiliency of our Graph and increasing support for authentication-based IDs, we are also investing in research and development around the use of other signals, such as contextual data, to maintain behavioral targeting inside non-authenticated environments. We will be sharing our findings and future plans in this space in the coming months.”
Budi Tanzi, VP, Product, Experian
Facilitate a knowledge exchange
Reach out to your network to find out what others are testing and what’s working. Start collaborating with agencies and brands across the buy-side to meet their needs.
“The collaborative spirit displayed by our partners constantly inspires me. Listening to the obstacles our industry faces allows this community to build strong relationships, create action plans, and deliver true value.”
Carly Allcorn, Account Executive, Publisher & Supply-Side Partnerships, Experian
Invest in an identity graph
Invest in an identity graph provider to sync first-party cookies and addressable IDs. This ensures that your data remains accessible and actionable in a cookieless world.
“Many participants at our think tank with Experian expressed the need to find an identity solution while also exploring other ways they can start to address cookie deprecation while maintaining business as usual.”
Callie Askenas, Director of Publisher Development, OpenX
How Experian and OpenX can help
Graph from Experian captures all available digital identifiers in real-time and resolves them back to individuals and households. We’re signal agnostic, continuously expand the IDs we support, and futureproof identity resolution through a combination of deterministic, probabilistic, and cookieless identifiers.
Experian is a key player in OpenX’s OpenAudience solution and helps to power many of their data segments as well as their identity graph. While OpenX collaborates with a variety of providers and operates a fully interoperable platform, Experian remains valuable to the core technology within OpenX’s supply-side platform (SSP).
Experian can help you prepare for the cookieless future
It’s clear that the cookieless future poses some unique challenges for publishers, but there are solutions. Publishers and their supply-side partners can come up with strategies to target consumers in intentional ways by continually testing multiple identifiers and cookieless solutions, developing their own persistent ID, creating velvet rope content, and returning to contextual targeting. Collectively, these actionable strategies can help ensure that publishers have a more successful transition into a cookieless future.
Experian has been preparing for signal loss for quite some time and we continue to make substantial investments to ensure our resiliency and the resiliency of our customers. We continue to diversify our signal creating profiles with more persistent identifiers which allows us to pair authentication-based universal identifiers such as UID2 into our Graph seamlessly.
Experian is ready and we are here to navigate the future of privacy together.
To find out more about how Experian can help you prepare for the cookieless future, get in touch with a member of our team today.
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The holiday season is just around the corner, and retailers and marketers are gearing up for the busiest shopping period of the year. It's crucial to understand how consumer behavior is evolving and what emerging trends to expect. Experian's 2023 Holiday spending trends and insights report analyzes recent trends, consumer spending habits, and anticipates what's to come in 2023 to help you deliver a top-notch shopping experience this holiday season. In this blog post, we'll cover three key insights from our report. 1. Consumers are shopping earlier It's no secret that December has always been the go-to month for consumers when it comes to holiday spending. However, holiday shopping now starts earlier, particularly with online sales. This can be attributed to a surge in promotions and deals, enticing shoppers to open their wallets ahead of time, giving a significant boost to holiday sales. Notably, Cyber Week sales have proven to be an influential factor, accounting for 8% of total consumer holiday spending. Experian tip Reach the right shoppers with your promotions with sell-side targeting. This powerful approach gives you control over where your ads are placed while ensuring maximum visibility through direct connections with publishers. Whether on mobile, web, or CTV, this seamless ad experience will engage your audience effectively. 2. Online sales are on the rise The popularity of online holiday sales is continuously growing, surpassing in-store shopping. There has been a consistent 1% year-over-year increase in online sales, while in-store sales have seen a 1% decrease. "It’s easier for consumers to comparison shop for large ticket items online that they might find at a mass retailer or office supply store. Consumers prefer to have larger, bulkier items shipped directly to their home for minimal cost. By shopping online, consumers can save time since they don’t need to wait in checkout lines." Anna Liparoto, Sr. Account Executive, Retail & CPG Although online sales currently make up only one-third of all holiday shopping, there is immense potential for further expansion. Mass retailers and office, electronics, and games industries particularly excel in online holiday sales. While in-store purchases remain the primary choice for holiday shoppers, consumer online and offline activities intersect before the final purchase. Experian tip Take advantage of the surge in online shopping by diversifying your marketing channels. An agnostic identity graph can bring together device and media data, capturing valuable user insights. By gaining a holistic view of your target audience, you'll be able to optimize your ad spend and allocate resources effectively, ultimately boosting your return on investment. "Omnichannel targeting during the upcoming holiday season will continue to prove to be the best way to reach scale and maximize ROI across all marketing channels."Joe LigÉ, Head of Enterprise Demand Partnerships 3. 2023 holiday spending will be on par with 2022 During the holiday season in 2022, consumer spending showed an anticipated increase, although the growth rate was slightly lower compared to previous years. October saw a surge in average consumer spending, indicating a swift response to early discounts and promotions offered by retailers. As the holiday season progressed, holiday spending gradually slowed down and reached a level similar to that of the previous year. Overall, there was a modest 2% growth. Looking into the future, if economic conditions remain stable in the second half of 2023, we can expect holiday spending to align with the figures from last year. Experian tip To truly maximize impact, consider data enrichment. By diving deeper into your target audience's preferences and behaviors, you can better tailor your strategies and seamlessly integrate the enriched data across various channels. This allows you to unlock the true potential of your ad inventory, creating more meaningful connections with your audience. Download our 2024 report Get ready for the holiday shopping season with Experian's 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report. Inside you'll find: Analysis of past trends and what they mean for 2024 Exclusive predictions for the upcoming holiday season The top audiences to activate this holiday season To access to all of our predictions for this year's holiday shopping season, download our 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report today. Download now Latest posts
As technology reshapes our media experience, TV remains a powerful channel for content consumption. In our next Ask the Expert series, we dive into a pivotal subject – the convergence of TV, linear (conventional broadcast and cable TV), and digital marketplaces. In this Q&A segment, we’re joined by two industry experts, Dan Hickox, VP of Development & Partnerships at 605, an iSpot.tv Company, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships, who guide us through an engaging discussion on convergent TV, attribution, measurement, and safeguarding personal data in the evolving landscape of TV advertising. How convergent TV is changing the future of advertising The convergence of traditional TV and digital streaming platforms presents an innovative opportunity for advertisers to engage their target audience. With convergent TV, you can create campaigns that bridge the gap between linear and streaming, ensuring your message reaches your target audience while avoiding ad fatigue. Along with high-quality content, extensive inventory, and targeting capabilities, convergent TV offers advanced measurement and attribution tools that will empower you to optimize advertising campaigns for maximum impact. You can make better decisions regarding when and where to strategically allocate your advertising budgets with effective TV measurement and attribution. Attribution in converged TV TV attribution involves tracing consumer actions and uncovering valuable insights into their behavior. With these insights, you can gain a clear understanding of the audience exposed to your ads and their actions in response. Lean into data attribution tools to track your target audience throughout the customer buying journey. Measurement in converged TV In contrast, TV measurement enables the tracking of performance TV advertising campaigns to assess campaign effectiveness. 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Watch the full Q&A Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Dan and Chris's full conversation about TV measurement, data analytics, privacy regulations, and the evolving landscape of TV advertising in the digital age. Watch now About our experts Dan Hickox, VP, Solutions Consulting, Development & Partnerships, 605 As the Vice President of the Solutions Consulting team, Dan collaborates with sellers to turn prospective opportunities into long-term client relationships. He leads new initiatives and drives partnerships that expand 605 capabilities and improve marketplace positioning. Dan brings over a decade of cross-channel media experience in advanced analytics, media optimization, data integration and statistical analysis to 605. Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats! Latest posts
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