The Addressability Reset as the cookie crumbles

Authored by Shailley Singh, Executive Vice President, Product & Chief Operating Officer, IAB Tech Lab

The countdown has begun with Google Chrome starting 1% third party cookie deprecation in January 2024. Early estimates pointed to a 30% drop in monetization for publishers. Although Google has postponed the deprecation once again, eventually third-party cookies will go away. The industry must not see this as an excuse to be complacent but continue to urgently develop alternative solutions.

 Addressability, or ability to target and activate audiences, is of foremost importance to advertisers and publishers. Here are some modern and privacy preserving addressability approaches.

 Take charge of your first party data

Today, both publishers and advertisers have a vast-amount of authenticated users who have registered using their email or phone numbers and provided permissions for advertising. You can deploy this data to activate audiences using Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs):

• Directly matched audiences in a Data Clean Room can be activated via protocols like Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR)
• Some Data Clean rooms also offer advanced modeling capabilities to find similar audiences and extend the reach within the context of the publisher’s data.
• Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) allows publishers to take charge of their first party data and activate audience-based buying in programmatic channels.
• UID 2 helps publishers monetize authenticated logged in users by applying a consistent identity across inventory types.

First party data approaches offer deterministic solutions for activating advertiser audiences and innovative approaches like look alike modeling, offer opportunities to extend reach for advertisers.

 Get an Identity (ID) solution service

What if I don’t have first party data or my users don’t register or log in? There are multiple options available to publishers in these scenarios:

• Integrate an Identity (ID) solution service that will help maintain unique identification of users at individual, household or device levels. These can be used to match data sets with advertisers
• Deploy an Identity (ID) Resolution Service that will provide a unified view of an individual or household across systems and devices. Again, these sophisticated algorithms and data sources can be used to match data sets with advertisers

It is important to understand privacy considerations and the available scale of these approaches for viable results. Check IAB Tech Lab guidance for ID solutions here for details.

 Go contextual

There are still scenarios where user choice will result in declined permissions or advertising opt out. Leveraging the power of the user's context is a great option in this scenario. This requires deploying industry standard content taxonomy to classify your content and work with partners to read and act on the contextual signals in bid requests.

 Platform Solutions

Last but not the least, Google Chrome (Privacy Sandbox) and Microsoft (Ad selection APIs) have each developed a set of new Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) that deploy on device (or in browser) bidding and auction processing to enable several advertising use cases. Learn more about the Privacy Sandbox in Tech Lab’s fit gap assessment report here. These solutions are in early stages of production deployment, but promise privacy safe ways to target audiences and measure campaign performance.

 Analyze, Test, Collaborate

Despite the wide choice of solutions, there is no silver bullet. You will need to deploy a combination of one or more of the above solutions for best results. Publishers will need to analyze their inventory to understand what gets them higher bid density and RPM. Similarly, advertisers will have to analyze their data sets and their media buys to arrive at the solutions that get the best ROI/ROAS.

 Advertisers and publishers need to collaborate to test these solutions, optimize workflows and operational processes. IAB Tech Lab is doing its part with providing guidance and specifications for interoperability across the portfolio of addressability solutions so collaboration is easy, consistent and scalable.