I’m hoping your mental audio kicked in with an interpretation of a movie trailer with a Don LaFontaine voiceover when you read the title. I wrote this post in response to a lot of articles written from a position of fear from the advertising industry at the prospect of web browsers shipping with 3rd party cookies disabled. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and should not be construed as the opinions of my employer, associations or other groups I happen to belong to.
There’s a lot of highly visible worry in the news lately about online advertising losing the ability to set 3rd party cookies in a web browser. This technology is used to perform a variety of seemingly critical tasks: retargeting, audience targeting, frequency capping, user identification for RTB and probably a hundred other things – most of which I try not to know in detail.
The biggest concern seems to be that this growing part of the industry gets turned upside down if more browser companies decide to ship their products with 3rd party cookie disabled by default. Apple did this with their Safari browser which has been one component responsible for slowing down advertiser adoption of iOS devices. But advertisers have alternatives (like: display ads in other browsers, keywords, and online video ads) that they’re more comfortable with anyway, so there’s no telling how much of an impact the lack of 3rd party cookies on iPhones and iPads really has on the growth of the mobile ad revenue stream. Read more
In a typical RTB transaction there’s a user ID, pulled from the user’s cookie or some form of server side system, which is passed to the DSP from the SSP. That ID is, in most cases, the DSPs record locator for the user’s information. Most DSPs have a server side data store where this information is housed, updated and augmented from a variety of sources including data companies like Blue Kai and Excelate and their ilk. DSPs may also be collecting and distilling information based on bid request activity from that user (although most SSPs put language into the contracts governing the use of this “bid stream” data) or retargeting data gathered for their customers. This type of data system is generally referred to as a Data Management Platform (DMP) in the industry. While there are some stand-alone DMPs out there, more and more DSPs are integrating or building their own.
Bernhard Glock of Medialink, who was not on the panel, but chimed in with a profound thought. Buying on television is buying something that’s familiar, with seemingly known or at least comfortable impact and expectations on results. By contrast, buying online display is a complete mystery. His solution, just buy on television because that’s what he understands.
