Predicting the Future of TV without Cookies. A Discussion with a4’s Natalia Irmin

We are facing an industry measurement change with the upcoming retirement of the cookie. While not always the optimal way of data gathering, we as an industry have come to rely on it. But this change need not be a challenge according to a4’s Director of Data and Strategy, Natalia Irmin. 

In fact, a cookieless future is going to looking pretty good. “Cookies are not something that's always existed. It feels like they always existed, but actually hasn't. We still measured before cookies were available and those practices will be coming back,” she explained.

Embracing a Cookieless Future

For Irmin, there are lots of options for measuring without cookies. “First, you still have your first party data which gives you a lot of flexibility,” she noted. And there are new technological breakthroughs that weren’t even imagined when cookies were first introduced. “How do I use artificial intelligence,” she posited, “How do I use data science to create the models that are going to inform what I need to do with my advertising? That is something that a lot of companies are thinking about and coming up with solutions.” But, she noted, “Not the entire universe is deterministic. It depends on the the breadth of your operations. You might have to deal with data that's not necessarily one to one. If you want to keep doing that, you’ll have to think about working with models that focus on incremental reach beyond TV.”

Data from cookies for Irmin falls into two buckets – targeting and measurement. “I think targeting is less of a challenge,” she stated and added, “The measurement portion, how are you going to measure, is more challenging.

Grappling with Walled Gardens

Walled gardens present another ongoing challenge for measurement. But Irmin remains generally optimistic about the industry’s ability to work with walled garden companies. “What I'm finding,” she began, “Is that recently there's been more talk about collaboration and moving beyond those walled gardens.” And yet, she averred, “While we find it useful to collaborate with other companies, we still recognize that the walled garden still exists and some of them, depending on their size, are still useful to work with. You are not going to stop working with some walled gardens,” just because they don't allow you to access certain data.

Being Pro-Active in Industry Changes

Getting ahead of industry changes and evolving into new solutions is pivotal for companies who want to develop the best, most accurate and sophisticated solution to industry changes concerning data. Google, after all, gave the industry a year to adjust before it retires the cookie. Procrastination, however, is not recommended. “From our perspective at a4, we keep exploring all the solutions that come up in the marketplace and start testing,” early in the time frame. “The adjustment period seems like the more correct way to go, because you don't want to wake up one day and be like, ‘Oh I just don't have a solution for this, because I had that extra year and I completely forgot about it and was focusing on other stuff and now I have nothing.’ Definitely don’t do that,” she warned.

Contextual Targeting

For a4, the future, and even the present, rests on contextual targeting. “We are more focused on targeting for measurement and have developed our own internal solutions that include both first party data and modeling,” she explained, “For targeting you’ve got to start thinking more seriously about contextual. With cookies, contextual was always viewed as something that's less good, less accurate, perhaps. But in reality, contextual actually provides you with ability to control your brand safety and it means that you're actually going to those places where your audience is.”

The value of contextual marketing cannot be under-estimated. “You can target certain inventory and nothing else. When you work within the DSP, for example, you have a source of inventory. You then take IPs that you've determined are associated with certain households and a footprint you want to target. Then you layer on top of that inventory specific behavioral targets, people who visit certain related websites. Then measure your campaign after the fact, and make adjustments. Using IPs and measuring contextually allows you to find the audience that you're looking for,” she said.

Collaboration and Team Effort is Vital

Perhaps the most important aspect of navigating through industry change is collaboration and team effort. “It comes down to the people that you get to work with within your organization and with people in other organizations. Because we work with so many different partners, you can really see the difference between working with a company that has people that care or not. One of the best things about working at a4 is working with the people and the teams. I see how hard these teams work to provide to provide a solution and provide answers to all these questions and challenges that that our clients are facing and be able to tell them ‘Don't worry.’ We’ve got you. We know how to help you. We know what you're dealing with and we're working diligently to maintain and expand our offering to give you something extra to help you face those challenges,” she concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

The Crumbling Cookie. Interview with Anthony Katsur, President, Sonobi

Despite his studies in biochemistry and criminal justice, Anthony Katsur, President of Sonobi, was “always spending time in the UNIX lab in Albany,” he explained. “My first intro to tech was working at a startup with some buddies in college. We wound up selling to a local business services company before the big ISPs got into the game. Then I moved to the city and continued on the technology track and got hooked on ad tech” he added. 

 Anthony’s career spans stints at DoubleClick, MediaMath, Maxifier and Rubicon Project before joining Sonobi. He is also an active angel investor and has just written an article for Media Village on header bidding.

Tony has great enthusiasm for marketing tech and the programmatic space in general. The following are his perspectives on ad and marketing tech, cookies, the future of programmatic and television.

Charlene Weisler: What is your definition of programmatic?

Anthony Katsur: It is when technology and data are applied in unison to solve for the marketers’ dilemma. The marketers’ dilemma is to maximize the efficacy of their media investment which is to reach the right consumer to drive them to the appropriate business outcome. It is not just about reaching the right people at the right time – a lot of people use that term and it is overwrought – it is about business outcomes – to drive the consumer to some heightened awareness or call to action. 

Charlene Weisler: Has ad tech changed since you first started? If so, how?

Anthony Katsur: Ad tech 1.0 was about automation of the old school way that print advertising was bought and sold. We introduced that concept into digital. Display ads were really no different than the ads you would see in a newspaper or a magazine. Also, buying was occurring directly between buyers and sellers. If we’re looking at this in phases, phase 1 was the invention of the ad server. Phase 2 or ad tech 2.0, evolved into ad exchanges and the introduction of RTB. That is where the real-time exchange, real-time buying and the RTB protocol were born. Phase 3 is the phase we are entering today which is where header-based technologies supersede the ad server. This technology is on course to potentially replace the ad server in the next 5 to 8 years. The third party cookie, as we have known it, is undergoing pressure and will probably disappear altogether. We are going to move towards better ways of identifying and understanding consumer behavior across multiple channels and putting relevant and useful messages in front of them.  

Charlene Weisler: So no more ad servers?

Anthony Katsur: Ad servers may radically evolve so that you no longer see it as an ad server, almost like a dinosaur of this age. This is not an insult. If you look at studies about the evolution of birds, for example, they evolved from a lizard but we don’t think of them as being a former dinosaur. As programmatic concepts and ad servers merge, they will evolve in the same way. It won’t look anything like its original inception. 

Charlene Weisler: What about consumer targeting?

Anthony Katsur: They say consumers are fragmenting. Consumers aren’t fragmenting! Last I checked, I haven’t cloned myself into four people. But I am consuming content through so many different channels now. It started out simply with the desktop and then with video online. Then, ads on the smartphone revolutionized the ability to use phones as an advertising platform and the efficacy of the mobile channel is still TBD. Now, with the introduction of the Internet of things, connected television, and all of your connected devices at home, this mobility enables the consumer to ingest content and communicate across a myriad of platforms. The ecosystem has to go through this massive evolution, again, to reach consumers across all of those different platforms. And you can’t forget about the traditional platforms. Television is here to stay. It is still the most powerful advertising medium, but how is it introduced into this new way of thinking?

Charlene Weisler: Is there a future for cookies and if not, what will replace them?

Anthony Katsur: How can I say this? With the future of cookies, the meteor has not hit the earth yet but it is on its way. Cookies build a rickety bridge in addressing a consumer. They have a high churn rate, between 20% and 40% (this varies depending upon the study referenced) and simply don’t live in many environments where the consumer now spends their time. I don’t think the cookie will become 100% obsolete, but it becomes less relevant over time, to the point at which it is more or less obsolete. It’s like the typewriter. Is the typewriter obsolete? Don’t some people still use it? That being said, I feel there are three steps to the 30-foot data bridge to achieve true addressability to the consumer. The cookie is the first 10-feet. The next 10-feet is device ID, where you don’t really have as high a churn rate. If you can marry an ID to a single user ID then you can start to understand the media consumption behaviors of consumers. 

Lastly, the Holy Grail is PII graph data, of course anonymized, scrubbed for email, phone number, and home address into some non-identifiable token. This is done as a way to become less intrusive to the consumer. With the truly addressable consumer, advertisers will know that I have seen two TV spots and now that I am online, I may not need to see yet another spot that day or week or for the life of the campaign. The introduction of global reach and frequency controls enables marketers to more effectively get their message across without being intrusive. For example – I bought new headphones yesterday – went online and made the purchase. Since then, I have been hit by a ton of ads for headphones on Facebook, on my desktop, and on my phone, all in the past 24 hours. I have already made the purchase! There is nothing joining those channels and formats together because the cookie doesn’t work across multiple channels. That is part of the problem. I think over the next five years there will be an evolution where cookies, device ID, and scrubbed PII graph data will have to work in concert. 

Charlene Weisler: But isn’t there a slippery slope regarding privacy?

Anthony Katsur:  I agree. How do we solve for this? I don’t claim to be a privacy expert. Alan Chapell has great heritage and is a leader on this topic. I would look to him and other experts for how we can protect consumer privacy as we move to the more addressable consumer. It is absolutely critical that we as an industry do a better job of self-governance from a privacy perspective. And I think there will be some regulation to protect consumer privacy because there could be one bad actor who ruins it for everybody. However, legislation will take time. 

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see Sonobi and the industry going in the next five years?

Anthony Katsur: I think Sonobi in the next 5 years will be a large component in the advertising industry. We are building and powering the data bridge that we talked about before. I think in the overall industry, we will see further consolidation in ad tech and within media. I think Google, possibly Snapchat and others are forcing that consolidation because of scale. We don’t need as many ad tech players in the space as there are today.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com