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The Identity Crisis

This entry was originally posted on The Drum as an Open Mic Article.

The exact date upon which the 3rd party cookie vanishes is tough to pin down. What we are reasonably certain of is that sometime in the second half of 2024 the Google team will release a version of Chrome that will have them turned off by default.

One of the foundational underpinnings of online advertising will cease to exist. Falling away will be the common key used to value and target ad opportunities, contextual signals used to build audience segments, attribution functionality used to gauge performance, not to mention the collateral impact that losing all these things will bring.

It’s important to explore both the direct and indirect impact of cookie deprecation to have as much of a complete picture as possible. If one becomes too focused on the direct impact, they will lose sight of the long-term and peripheral damage from the wake of this change.

The Open Web

The most obvious and directly impacted media will be the open web. While contextual advertising is back on the rise, prying cookie-based buying out of the hands of advertisers and agencies is impossible to do without the market forcing the transition.

Relying solely on cookied users up until the last minute is a game of chicken that will end careers. Those marketers unwilling or unable to adapt ahead of time may find themselves playing catch-up while their counterparts are thriving.

Cookies gave marketers a level of certainty that they were targeting the exact person or device that was appropriate for the campaign. Retargeting benefited greatly from this functionality once it was combined with the ubiquity of header bidding, RTB and programmatic stacks. Reaching the person who left the store after “just looking” frequently brought them back to buy the thing they were looking at.

Several agencies went so far as to acquire data companies. These acquisitions could easily turn to write-offs without intelligent, targeted investment in wholly new paradigms of finding and building audiences.

Walled Gardens

Many see the walled gardens as fairly insulated from the loss of cookies. It’s not true. The immediate impact that Apple’s ATT had on Facebook should be proof of that. Without an ability to read an ID in a 3rd party context, walled gardens lose much of their ability to extend their media buys across other properties or even show attribution metrics.

In these murky times, it’s unclear as to whether or not the open web will benefit by receiving more direct buys from advertisers, or if the advertisers will just double-down on the O&O of the walled gardens. It’s the same audience they were reaching before, but the deterministic signals are mostly stuck inside the walls now.

Audience

Without a cookie, data companies cannot pin behaviors to a user. They cannot build a deterministic profile. Everything online, absent something like hashed emails, which are scarce, becomes probabilistic, and temporally unstable. 

It’s not as though other IDs or designators don’t exist in different contexts, that’s a given. The problem is that the open web offers a richness of context unmatched by any other segment of media. Without that context and a reasonably stable identifier, audience segment diversity dwindles. With the web: auto enthusiast, charitable, camping, and a hundred other interests can be derived from browsing activity. Without the web: a dozen well-used apps, a few regularly watched TV shows, sports.

Bleeding Over

When the audience signals fade, the impact spreads far beyond the web. CTV, mobile, even Digital Out of Home targeting leverages the contextual segmentation from online, web activity. Identity graphs may do well to continue linking devices together, and create household profiles. That doesn’t help fill in the audience signal gap that sits behind the graph in the segment targeting of a campaign.

It’s not just the targeting, but the post campaign analysis that may suffer. With fewer signals, the audience becomes more difficult to discern. Understanding which group converts, where to target the follow-up, finding opportunities, all these things become, if not more difficult, less reliable.

Light in the Darkness

Some believe there’s yet one more reprieve from the 3rd party cookie’s impending demise. The chance of it living beyond 2024 is shrinking, not growing. All recent indications coming out of the Chrome camp suggest that they’re going to stick to their commitment to deprecation in 2024

The industry has been preparing for the loss of signal for several years now, thanks in part to Google moving the deadline. It was a good wake-up call. Solving the online advertising problems that arise from a lack of cookies, however, takes time. Thankfully, we’ve had just that, even if we aren’t likely to get any more.

Several tools are out there. Most are currently in a foundational stage, alpha and beta testing, and being applied in practice to browsers that are already cookie-cripled. Hashed emails (HEMs), 3rd party IDs, 1st party IDs, browser fingerprints, and IP addresses are just a few identifiers in play. Not all are as privacy friendly as some of the platforms and privacy advocates would like, and others might not be as popular (yet) with all industry players.

Even with these alternatives, buyers and sellers must still fundamentally shift the way they do business. None of these solutions offer the same level of coverage on user activity as the cookie does, even with only the one, mostly-dominant browser still supporting them. And some of these solutions will be threatened by the same forces that are pushing the cookie out.

Ad tech has been–and still is–in the process of hedging their bets, partnering with multiple solution providers, augmenting systems to recognize and leverage some of these alternative methods of identity, and talking about new ways of doing business that are more privacy friendly. Don’t be caught flat-footed. There’s work still to be done by everyone. But that’s why we all got into this business, right? There’s always another challenge around the corner.

Non-addressable is a “today” problem

Hero image for BlockThrough Podcast about non-addressable audiences

I sat down (virtually) with Neera Shanker from Blockthrough in December. We discussed a few market trends like non-addressable audiences, privacy regulation and the platform giants (Apple and Google).

In this episode, I actually know wtf I’m talking about. It’s only my second attempt at guesting on a podcast. And the first time I really had the appropriate expertise on a subject.

Here I’m talking about ad-tech and how non-addressable audiences (no cookie IDs and such) are an important area of focus. Many online publishers are not giving this topic enough attention. If that kinda thing is interesting to you, or you just like hearing the sound of my voice, give it a listen.

Tune in to learn about how I got started in ad tech waaaaaay back in 1997. The internet was a different place back then. It’s striking to remember how a small operation could have a large impact.

Then you’ll hear about my work at Yieldmo, my day job. Hint: I really like my job. In my best radio voice I talk about my typical day, challenges I’m helping to overcome, and how we measure success.

Finally, I evangelize the need for non-addressable solutions in the market. It’s a big issue that will require investment (time and money) in order to future-proof the industry.

If you’d like to grab the podcast in your favorite app, jump over to buzzsprout for the links.

Coming to a screen near you: Fewer Cookies

I wrote an earlier post called “In a world without cookies” which was my early response to the default setting in Apple’s Safari browser.  This issue has expanded such that we’ll see even fewer cookies out there, so I’m going to bring a little more light to the issue of privacy and privacy compliance in mobile, tablet and the desktop.

For the purposes of addressing privacy, the physicality of the device, whether it is a tablet, phone, or a desktop computer, can be mostly ignored.  The real technical distinctions with regard to privacy are between browsers and apps.  It’s also important to understand the need for advertising companies to maintain compliance with organizations like the NAI and initiatives like the OAB.  Together, the OAB and NAI dictate opt-out rules that online advertising companies must adhere to.

3rd Party Cookie Blocking

Block 3rd Party Cookies Results in Fewer Cookies in the Browser

Apple’s Safari browser has a default set to block third party cookies. Firefox will soon have a similar default setting.

The most prolific obstacle in privacy and compliance is probably a result of Apple’s move to disable 3rd party cookies by default in their Safari browser.  This is not just the Safari that ships on your iPad or iPhone, but all Safari browser installs, including that one on everyone’s beloved Windows machine.  Now, the team behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser has pledged to do the same.  Blocking by default causes two problems: advertising companies can’t do simple things like frequency cap using a cookie, and there’s no way to determine the user’s actual intent.  If the default setting was to allow 3rd party cookies, a user’s intent would be crystal clear if it was set to block. Read more

Advertising Across Mobile Devices

This is the fourth in a series of posts walking readers through the mobile advertising space. Stay tuned for at least one more post in the coming weeks. This post is also published on the Rubicon Project blog.

Fragmented Advertising on Mobile

Fixing Mobile

When evaluating advertising options on mobile devices, it is important to consider the screen size as well as whether the content is viewed in mobile web or a native mobile application. Content that is viewed in a browser is often suboptimal for advertising. When presented with a standard un-optimized web page the phone’s browser will shrink the content to fit the width of the display. This has the unfortunate side effect of also shrinking ads, often until they’re very small. In this scenario, advertisers are not getting their money’s worth, as their ads are often too small to see.

Advertising Banners

To successfully advertise on web pages displayed on a mobile phone a site’s layout must be mobile optimized. This single column of content optimized for a phone’s screen lends itself to an advertising unit that spans the screen unobstructed. While hardly anyone would think that these small banner units that span the screen are the answer to mobile advertising needs, this is at least a place to start.

In an attempt to expand the advertising opportunities on mobile, the IAB is working with advertisers and publishers to create new, more engaging ad units for mobile. These units have names like “Push” and “Slider”. They are initially inconspicuous on the page, but can take over the entire screen to create a more immersive experience. Adhesion banners stay in the same place on the screen, remaining in view throughout the user’s session. Creative thinking like this has led to ad units that expand to the limits of the screen of the device. Rather than being little boxes on the screen, these ad units use the full dimensions of the device to be more immersive and engaging.

App Environment

Content viewed in mobile apps have distinct challenges from their web counterparts. These challenges are common to phones and tablets.  The most prominent challenge is the requirement of the SDK (or Software Development Kit). SDKs are sets of code that an application developer integrates into their app to allow mobile ads to run within their app.  Mobile inventory buyers, generally, develop SDKs.  Their code enables the application to call the buyer’s ad server to get ads and render them properly.  For each demand source that the application developer partners with, there is likely a new SDK integration.  The problem is that all these SDKs have a distinct set of instructions to perform a fairly common set of tasks. The proliferation of distinct SDKs has resulted in more fragmentation in the market.

There are still stories of app developers integrating up to seven different SDKs to manage the need for competitive demand for inventory.  Managing multiple SDKs can be problematic.  There is non-trivial operational and technical overhead of integrating additional code to the application. Demand partners have their own development roadmaps and update their SDKs on their schedule.  Each time an SDK is updated the application developer needs to re-integrate the code and re-submit the app for approval to iTunes or Google Play.

It’s not all gloom and doom in the app world though. The IAB has recently made efforts to normalize the SDK interactions to reduce the learning curve for integrating different SDKs.  It introduced the Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions, or MRAID.  MRAID is an effort to create a common set of standards.  Indeed, many mobile advertising companies now offer MRAID compliant creatives. As support for MRAID grows we all can be hopeful that these woes will subside.

Through the use of SDKs, mobile apps are able to make use of functionality that is native to mobile devices to deliver a more engaging advertising experience. Companies such as InMobi or Celtra offer a rich advertising experience to the user instead of the standard still-image ad (with click-through) that is very prominent in online display advertising.  The SDK opens the door for highly interactive and engaging ads, which have actually been well received by users.

Tablets

Tablet inventory, whether accessed through an app or web, comes with some interesting opportunities.  First among them is the larger screen offering the potential for larger ad formats.  There are several tablet-specific formats gaining traction in the market.  Some are custom for a specific application.  Others, like the Filmstrip from IAB’s rising stars, are approaching a level of standardization that can be leveraged by application developers and the currently rare tablet-optimized web.

The impact of these challenges depends on the user experience that you design for your mobile users. You should decide what the appropriate experience is for your content type, and then deal with the relevant advertising issues that arise. Formatting and building content specifically for mobile is the first step toward monetizing content. Have you had issues integrating SDKs with your mobile apps?

Building Content for Mobile Devices

This is the third in a series of posts walking readers through the mobile advertising space. Stay tuned for more posts over the coming weeks. This post is also published on the Rubicon Project blog.

Fragmented Mobile Content

Fixing Mobile

As I covered in the first blog post, mobile presents a tremendous market opportunity for publishers. A large and growing share of traffic comes from mobile devices. According to comScore, 13.3% of pageviews came from mobile devices in August.

On a smartphone there are basically two ways to go online: web or apps. Let’s start with apps. In contrast to mobile web, apps have been built from the ground up for smartphones. Content has rendered into an experience that doesn’t require a mouse and/or keyboard.  Additionally, apps normally don’t feel like a pared down or diminished version of their online display counterpart. Think about your favorite app – it’s likely that you’re playing a game, checking weather, interacting on a social network or looking for directions. These experiences seem natural on a smartphone app.

Apps vs Browser

In contrast to apps, using a browser on a smartphone to access a site’s “desktop experience” creates a number of challenges. When presented with a standard web page the smartphone’s browser will shrink the content to fit the width of the display.  This has the unfortunate effect of making all of the content very small, forcing the user to pinch, zoom and swipe to see content.

In order to combat this effect, publishers create “mobile optimized” websites. These sites are built with the screen size limits in mind. They typically feature pared down versions of their online display (desktop) counterparts, and often put smaller versions of images in-line with text designed to take the full width of the smaller screen.

In contrast to a negative experience on a smartphone, a tablet has more in common with standard desktop experiences.  Most standard web sites render just fine on tablets and even the ads can be seen. Users can view content on tablets with very little zooming and swiping. However, while the content renders mostly correct, tablets do share a challenge with their smartphone counterparts – the unique nature of touch navigation.

There are many resources online to guide you through the step-by-step process of optimizing your content for mobile devices. To get started it is important to recognize that mobile devices are navigated by touch, which is quite different than the mouse-driven, point-and-click navigation of the desktop world. Rather than clicks, you will design for taps; instead of scrolls you will design for drags and swipes. These are subtle differences that change the way that a user interacts with content. Button size becomes important. Drop down menus are harder to use. Anything that requires a hover is pretty much useless in a touch world.

Bytes

Another thing to consider is the file size of your site. Since much of the content accessed via mobile devices will be downloaded over cellular rather than high-speed access via Wi-Fi, it is important to trim the fat and reduce that file size as much as possible. A final consideration is the absence of Flash in the mobile web world. Flash content will not render on iOS devices. Given the ubiquity of iPhones and iPads, this is an important issue to address. There are alternatives to Flash, such as HTML5, that deliver similar capabilities and work across all devices.

At the end of the day, these devices share many characteristics but what works on a smartphone won’t necessarily work on a tablet; and vice-versa.  It’s important to examine these two device types independently to determine the best user experience for your content across these devices.  They need to be evaluated in terms of screen-size and form factor for strategies across content.  This goes from content to creative to analytics.  Have you built a mobile optimized site? What challenges have you faced? Comment below for other readers and I’ll address questions in future posts.

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