Whether or not marketers elect to continue making the third-party cookie a pillar of their marketing, cutting-edge cookieless solutions offer better results than ever before. Authenticated connectivity performs better than cookies alone and more and more channels are becoming cookieless – whether Safari and Firefox, or CTV and soon the IOT. As marketers build out their marketing stacks, the key to unlocking long term scale will be interoperability.
Authenticated identity holds the key
Third-party signals, and more specifically, the third-party cookie, have provided critical infrastructure over the past several decades of the internet, enabling companies to better understand how individuals use the internet – including understanding consumers’ interests, targeting ads to these interests, and enabling the advertising ecosystem to build its business around this. As new channels emerge and the overall scale of third party cookies decline, data-driven marketing faces a key hurdle, but also an opportunity in continuing to reach audiences and personalize experiences for them.
While the third-party cookie no longer has a built-in end date, the ecosystem is currently awash in solutions that enable better performance than the cookie does. While companies can continue to leverage third-party cookies to maximize the reach of their marketing on Chrome, those looking to innovate their marketing stack with newer solutions will need to find the mix of authenticated, cohort, and contextual solutions that work best for their goals, with each solution having its own pros and cons.
We see the gold standard as authenticated, people-based identity, where consumers authenticate and share their information with publishers and marketers. Major platforms have thrived in recent years because of people-based identity, and now this tool can be leveraged by the broader ecosystem to help level the playing field, bringing key benefits. Furthermore, among its many advantages, unlike cohorts and contextual marketing, authenticated identity enables omnichannel marketing to individuals, which also enables other key benefits across the organization.
People-based identity enables better advertising. Authentications enable publishers and marketers to build 1:1 relationships with the real people they’re trying to reach. By enabling activation on first-party data, as well as targeting of the right people across channels, people-based identity increases the value of inventory, as well as the effectiveness of ad spend.
People-based identity enables reach across environments that are unaddressable today, as well as environments that will become unaddressable. For many critical channels, the third-party cookie was never the answer: whether talking about CTV, mobile in-app, or others, authenticated identity enables omnichannel marketing that works anywhere audiences are spending their time. Even though a marketer’s Chrome campaigns can continue unabated on cookies, those looking to unify their view of customers, and better personalize and measure touchpoints, will be able to unlock better results with authenticated identity, in order to engage consumers on CTV, mobile in-app, cookieless browsers, as well as AI, the Internet of Things, and beyond.
People-based identity enables an omnichannel experience, improving engagement and measurability, all helping to unlock more effective advertising. Authenticated identity’s functionality across channels allows marketers to create a unified view of their customers and understand all touchpoints a consumer has with their advertising, enabling the marketers to personalize each consumer touchpoint and provide an engaging personalized experience, which consumers demand. Furthermore, in creating unified views of customers and breaking data silos within companies, organizations across a company can benefit from authenticated identity. For example, Product teams can benefit from person-level insight into how products are actually being used, while customer experience teams can have a holistic view of interactions with customers, including customer support and call center interactions. Critically, authenticated impressions are measurable impressions, giving marketers better insight into what’s working across all channels, and optimize their strategies in real time.
Interoperability extends authenticated identity’s reach
Third-party signals helped the adtech ecosystem scale, in large part because of their ubiquity. The third-party cookie, in particular, helped every part of the digital advertising ecosystem to work with each other.
Given the wide range of cookieless solutions, and the differing mix of solutions each company will want for its specific business goals, companies will need to select solutions that fit their unique mix of partners and customers. Without selecting solutions that enable them to connect to – and work with – the parts of the industry that they need connectivity to, companies will not be able to scale and grow.
Prioritizing interoperability in identity solutions means that companies can continue to partner with and sell to other parts of the ecosystem, even if their partners and customers are using a different set of solutions. Providers of authenticated identity are building interoperability among high-quality identifiers, ensuring their solutions connect beyond the limits of their ecosystems of partners, and achieve better scale for their businesses.
For example, LiveRamp’s interoperable design enables publishers that have LiveRamp’s authenticated identity solution enabled, to implement other high-quality solutions without additional configuration, resources, or fees, enabling these publishers to unlock additional inventory demand and further enable sustainable growth beyond the loss of any third-party signals they may currently be relying on.
Looking at the future of advertising
While stakeholders may be worried that the glut of options will bring fragmentation, in reality, these options will help the ecosystem to find the right solutions that fit their needs, and interoperability will be key to bringing these solutions together in a way that enables the ecosystem to scale. Relying on privacy-focused, high-quality identity solutions – like authenticated identity – will help bridge to a sustainable, post-signal loss future as the ecosystem and regulatory landscape continue to evolve. These solutions will help provide common infrastructure for the entire ecosystem to build a better way to reach and understand consumers after signal loss, and will enable marketers to work at the scale they need, allowing campaigns to run in every region, as well as globally.
Most importantly, authenticated identity will be a key tool for ensuring the adtech ecosystem favors consumer privacy. We strongly believe in a new ecosystem that doesn’t just offer consumers transparency into how their data is being used, but also returns control over their data. Authenticated identity helps bring this to bear by building on trusted value exchanges of content or services in return for consumers authenticating with data such as email addresses, offering transparency and control and rebuilding direct relationships with publishers and marketers.
How companies should move forward
As companies take the critical steps of selecting, testing, and fine-tuning the signal-less strategies to drive better-performing marketing, they must prioritize solutions that offer the interoperability they need to work with customers and partners in every channel that matters. Among interoperable solutions, authenticated identity offers a critical building block, due to the people-based marketing that it enables, as well as the future-forward sustainability and privacy it offers.
Companies that opt to innovate their marketing stack by going cookieless today stand to not only benefit from building alongside their customers and partners, but also benefit from the superior results these solutions offer today.