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.
Latest posts
The world of healthcare is often left to the doctors, surgeons and scientists. They examine our bodies, organs and genetics, determining if we are healthy and advising accordingly if we are not. This trust is well-warranted, as they spend years studying and practicing to ensure their patients receive the best care possible. However, individual health status is far more complicated than that, and cannot only be restricted to biology and chemistry. There are other factors that impact our well-being that must be accounted for in order to form a comprehensive picture of our necessary healthcare. Social Determinants of Health (or SDOH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age that shape our everyday health. They include socioeconomic factors such as education, neighborhood and housing, employment, social support networks and accessible transportation, among others. While not directly related to our clinical health, they still account for, and influence, many of our health outcomes. Take an elderly man proudly living alone in small town USA. Managing his diabetes is increasingly challenging. He had to give up his car eight months ago, so getting to his regular medical check-ups is a struggle. Without ongoing preventative care and maintenance, this gentleman will end up in the ER with possibly life-threatening conditions. If his physician can detect the change in his access to transportation, they can connect this patient to an eldercare transportation provider, enabling ongoing preventative care and thus avoiding costly emergency visits to the hospital. Access to transportation, healthier food, higher education and even parks can be a lifesaving factor in certain scenarios. This means that healthcare companies cannot rely solely on clinical or claims data if they wish to provide the best and most impactful care planning for their patients. They must take everything into account, from education to lifestyle to neighborhood. By looking at all available data, healthcare providers are able to get a more holistic view of the consumer and drive care plans that deliver better outcomes. Unfortunately, much of this data is fragmented and scattered, making it difficult to compare data points and group patients together in meaningful and efficient ways. Experian’s robust data and analytics is used to create more than risk scores – provide the right amount of intelligence in a digestible way to the care teams and clinicians that work with these patients every day. It provides relevant actionable insight into what drives a non-clinical cap in care, allowing healthcare organizations to make unprecedented, personalized adjustments to how they engage with patients’ in a privacy and HIPAA compliant manner. To learn how your healthcare organization can improve health outcomes and patient engagement using Experian data, visit https://www.experian.com/healthcare/solutions/patient-care-management-solutions/social-determinants-health.
NEW YORK, Oct. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, today announced a new partnership with Retargetly, a leading independent full stack data company. The partnership combines Tapad's cross-device identity resolution technology with Retargetly's robust data toolset, allowing brands and agencies using Retargetly's platform to seamlessly access an expanded audience across devices, without compromising precision. In addition to reach expansion, Tapad's global, privacy-safe digital cross-device solution, The Tapad Graph, enables Retargetly's brand and agency clients a more holistic digital customer journey analysis, and efficient campaign capabilities like frequency capping and online attribution. At the same time, Tapad will be able to extend its presence into the LATAM region, tapping into Retargetly's existing regional footprint. "Combining The Tapad Graph's technology with Retargetly's platform will enable customers to make holistic, data-driven decisions that increase the ROI of their campaigns," said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "We can now offer advertisers the value of both technologies to optimize their marketing initiatives across the globe by creating seamless experiences across multiple devices and channels." Understanding a consumer's cross-device journey is a marketing necessity. A recent study showed that 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience from brands1. With the number of devices per individual rapidly increasing, digital identity resolution becomes essential to create that streamlined experience consumers crave. "Similarly to Tapad, our goal is to offer marketers a suite of products that can increase the ROI of their campaigns," said Juan Amuchastegui, Head of Product at Retargetly. "In order to achieve this, marketers need digital cross-device identity resolution to gain attribution, acquisition and reach expansion capabilities. We chose Tapad as our partner because The Tapad Graph has differentiated global scale, and privacy-safe measures, which we knew would benefit our clients' campaigns." Santi Darmandrail, Managing Director at Retargetly added, "Across the Americas our clients choose to work with us because of our scale, our precision, and our unique approach to what data can do to transform business outcomes. In that scenario, partnering with Tapad and integrating The Tapad Graph onto our platform was really a no-brainer and we are beyond excited to be making that available for our more than 700 clients across the region." To learn more about Tapad and our digital identity resolution products, visit our identity solutions page. Contact us today! About Tapad Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, Denver, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About Retargetly: Retargetly is the leading independent data solution from Latam. Their proprietary platform processes over 25 billion data events a month and transforms them into actionable analytics that drive business results across the board. The recently launched Retargetly Audience Platform (RAM) is the number one data exchange in Latin America, with over 1000 active buyers and millions of dollars traded every year. Regargetly provides services across Latam and has offices in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo and New York. For more information, visit www.retargetly.com
NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, and The Trade Desk, a global advertising technology leader, partnered to integrate The Trade Desk's unified ID solution in April 2019. The Trade Desk's unified ID solution's objective is to serve as a standardized cookie ID to help marketers reach more of their audience on the open internet. After an initial six month period, Tapad reports significant adoption rates and enhanced customer results since their joint integration in April. As a result of the partnership, client brands, agencies, DMPs/ DSPs, Data Providers, Mobile Networks and Measurement/Analytics Providers, saw increased match rates up to 38% and more global coverage without compromising precision. With this combined offering, Tapad's global, privacy-safe digital cross-device solution, The Tapad Graph, connects brands with consumers over 4 billion devices globally. "There is a need for digital identity solutions outside the walled gardens that can accommodate the need for both precision and scale," said Chris Feo, SVP of Strategy and Global Partnerships at Tapad. "Through our partnership with The Trade Desk, we are empowering companies to have a comparable digital identity resolution across the open web as compared to the walled garden environments." Over 25 companies who license The Tapad Graph, such as Annalect, Semasio, Retargetly, and ThinkCX, have also included The Trade Desk's unified ID solution as a key identifier in their graph output. "The vast improvement in scale that Tapad has seen illustrates the value digital identity resolution products can bring for brands," said Nate Gawel, General Manager of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk. "We're looking forward to continuing work with Tapad to prove that the open internet can deliver the very same benefits many reserve for large platforms." Adoption of the unified ID solution allows all parties across the supply chain (SSPs, DSPs, DMPs and data providers) to utilize The Trade Desk's cookie footprint to increase their own cookie coverage across the global independent internet. For more information, please visit The Trade Desk's unified ID solution site, or https://www.experian.com/marketing/consumer-sync to learn more about Tapad's digital identity resolution products. About Tapad:Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Our one-of-a-kind Graph Select offering enables marketers the flexibility and freedom of choice to correlate devices to varied objectives, driving campaign effectiveness and business results. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About The Trade Desk:The Trade Desk™ is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through its self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and devices. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, and enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform. Headquartered in Ventura, CA, The Trade Desk has offices across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit thetradedesk.com or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Contact us today!