The cookie-based identity regime that fueled the first 25 years of the digital advertising is dying. What will replace it?
David Moore, ad tech veteran and CEO of fledgling startup BritePool, says he has an answer.
Moore is one of a handful of early ad tech entrepreneurs who are still actively building companies today. As founder and CEO of 24/7 media, he helped pioneer the ad network model. Later as chairman of WPP’s Xaxis, he did the same for programmatic.
Now he’s pushing a new idea: a reward program that grants “brite points” to people who agree to have their identities tracked across a federation of websites. These points can be exchanged for free gas or other benefits.
It sounds simple, but it’s not. To pull it off, BritePool needs involvement from a network of publisher partners to drive signups and ad tech partners, including MediaMath and Sonobi, to support interoperability with existing identity systems.
It’s important to note that BritePool and its publisher partners do not want to use detailed web activity, searches or shopping data as part of their value exchange with internet users.
“We only want to collect pure identity,” Moore says. “We don’t need to know if you’re male or female. We just want to know that it’s you.”
In this episode Moore discusses the complicated idea and exhorts publishers to pick up the pace on their answer to cookies, walled gardens and looming regulation.
“If you are a publisher, are you preparing for a future without cookies?” he asks. “Some are very concerned about it. Others not as concerned. But in order to have a transitional strategy you have to start now.”
