Cookieless Future

What are the alternatives?

There are many alternatives in the Post-Cookie Browser world

• First and foremost is the First Party Cookie or Audience Data: It's important to note that first-party data is here to stay. However, there are ways to make it more personalized. Websites already have access to a lot of user-specific information, such as login data, interests, and behavior. As a publisher, it's important to cultivate that relationship and create a meaningful data layer that enhances the user experience on the site. This can be done by providing relevant content, recommendations, and suggestions, as well as improving advertising experiences. By collecting data such as emails, phone numbers, location information, and behavior signals, audience buckets can be created. It's important to obtain user consent when collecting this data. There are specialized solutions available to publishers, but the drawback is the scale - the larger the data, the more opportunities there are to analyze it and make it easier to monetize.
• Contextual Advertising: Many publishers have experimented with contextual advertising, especially after complying with GDPR and CCPA regulations. This type of advertising involves analyzing keywords and content to determine user interests and display relevant ads. It's particularly effective for websites that cater to a specific niche, such as soccer, movies, or gaming, as advertisers can easily target a specific audience. However, one disadvantage is that it can be challenging for publishers who don't have direct relationships with advertisers and brands to scale up the number of contextual campaigns and rely on them as a recurring source of revenue. Additionally, in the Programmatic market, contextual advertising may face issues with scale and opportunity.
• Identity Solutions: There are many players in the ecosystem and all of these are trying to offer the most robust solution to the publishers and to the industry in general. While they have their unique strengths, they all are still very reliant on the first-party cookie data which is then layered with Persistent Identifiers like email. A robust ID system has a major advantage over the other options as it can work across multiple websites, devices, and environments. As it relies on Universal Identifiers, it gives advertisers greater reach and insights which drives CPMs. Some of these include:
  • ID5
  • TTD's Unified ID solution 2.0
  • Liveramp

• Google Solutions: As a primary voice in the digital advertising ecosystem (and also happens to own popular browser, Chrome), Google offers a few solutions:
  • Google PPID: A Publisher Provided Identifier (PPID) is an identifier assigned to a user by a publisher which Google now allows publishers to share with advertisers, allowing personalised advertising in a privacy-compliant way. Find more here.
  • Google PPS: Google Publisher Provided Signal (PPS) is a beta feature in Ad Manager that allows publishers to categorise their contextual data for programmatic monetization. Publishers using this solution can create segments using their first-party and contextual data which can then be made accessible to advertisers. 
  • Google Privacy Sandbox: This is Google's proposed solution to replace third-party cookies and includes a set of APIs; the Protected Audience API and most recently, the Topics API. These solutions are in active testing and development but they aim to ensure advertisers are able to reach their customers in a more privacy-focused way while still allowing for all digital economy metrics such as attribution, conversion, targeting etc. Read more here.
• Digital Fingerprinting: Instead of relying on single identifiers, Digital Fingerprinting utilises multiple preferences and settings in apps and browsers to create a unique profile for each user. However, this method can be problematic when it comes to privacy and compliance as it is not always clear to the user that they are opting into providing such data or indeed clear how to opt out. More recently, therefore, browser owners such as Google, Apple, and Mozilla have announced that they will be limiting device fingerprinting on their browsers. 
• Data clean rooms: While in theory, these are very similar to first-party data and ID solutions, these allow both advertisers and publishers to share data with a third party, i.e. data pools or data clean rooms, where this data is matched with existing data allowing for more insights through data enriching. The advantage these offer is privacy. Since the data is never exchanged and rather merged in a larger pool, this option provides privacy and protection for both advertisers and publishers. As with other solutions, these also require scale making them cost ineffective and inefficient for a small or mid-size publisher.

There are many other solutions and options available and as such the best approach for any publisher is to test possible solutions that can work for them or just keep an eye on the latest within the digital ecosystem. As the deadline approaches, expect stronger movements in this space allowing for better informed decision making.

Venatus Plans and Suggestions

Venatus has undertaken strategic planning to ensure we can remain flexible in the tech we eventually adopt. This means that if any of the above-mentioned technologies begin to gain significant traction in the industry, Venatus will be able to incorporate it into its publisher services rapidly.

We are actively testing and working with various partners to explore a range of solutions to reveal the best understanding of how to support our advertisers and publishers. Our team closely monitor industry developments and we are confident that we can continue to deliver great value to our partners.