Identity

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Personalization – paired with effective measurement – has enabled marketers to see and understand results, ultimately driving them to spend more. Madan Sundararaju, vice president of the M&E sector at Capgemini Americas, writes on how traditional media platforms can adapt to these trends and increase their share of ad revenue.

We read between the lines of Google’s progress report to the UK’s antitrust regulator on its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome. Could Google miss its own self-imposed 2023 deadline? “Signs point to yes.”

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

The word “cookieless” crops up in virtually every conversation about the future of online identity. But what exactly do people mean when they say “cookieless”? Although the definition seems simple enough – the absence of cookies – it lacks the nuance to encompass the true complexity of signal loss. It’s also a misnomer.

Even if third-party cookies weren’t on Chrome’s chopping block, brands would need a strategy to navigate signal loss, says Spiceology CEO Chip Overstreet. Spiceology is working with digital identity management company Parrable and MediaMath to retarget users in environments where third-party cookies aren’t available.

You get what you pay for. This adage is considered way too infrequently in the world of digital advertising, especially programmatic. There is so much pressure placed on gaining efficiency, both in execution and cost, that marketers have begun to prioritize “added value” impressions over meaningful business results, writes Elise Stieferman, director of marketing and business strategy at Coegi.

In today’s hybrid retail environment, customers can window shop in person or comparison shop online before completing their purchase in a store or on the internet. Or they partake in “buy online, pick up in store” (BOPIS). The need to capture the customer’s journey between online and offline behavior was the seed for Foursquare’s new Closed Loop feature, the location data platform’s latest addition to its attribution product

Under COPPA, businesses can’t target ads based on the data of children under 13 years old. Toy manufacturers like WowWee need other ways to get their products in market via advertising, and after testing a YouTube campaign with contextual ad platform Precise TV, the promising results allude to the potential of contextual in targeting ads effectively without audience data, profiles or cookies.

Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.