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ARTICLE

Are You Wasting Time During A Critical Phase?

March 11, 2021 — by MediaMath    

In the last week, Google has made clear their perspective and approach on how to evolve the foundations of digital advertising to better protect consumer privacy and personal identity, and in order to eventually regain consumer trust.

The main message of the blog post should not have come as a surprise:  “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.” Google’s approach and technical toolkit are (going to be) anchored in their Privacy Sandbox initiative for cohort-based targeting. This is consistent with what Google has been stating publicly over the past year.

MediaMath saw this coming…

Let’s start with stating the obvious:

Brands have been struggling with an inefficient ad ecosystem while publishers have battled to monetize effectively. Consumers lack trust in how their data is used. This is why we implemented an Identity architecture that’s unique and differentiated in the market.

The technical underpinnings are changing. Measurement will change. KPI benchmarks will change. This is not new. Remember Firefox? Safari? The market will see – at least for some time – a fragmentation of identifiers and multiple co-existing approaches: Consent-based deterministic targeting approaches, math-based probabilistic approaches.

Our commitment to our clients:

MediaMath has the architecture and partners in place to support our clients in whatever direction the industry moves. Our brand partners can choose identity and data partners that are the best fit for their marketing and data services stack. We provide our clients with the flexibility and optionality to use the ID solution (and targeting approach) that is best for them and allow them to transact natively on our platform. We already support aggregate approaches and will also support cohort-based approaches (incl. Flocs as soon as specifications become available).

We’re also leaning in on Google as part of their Privacy Sandbox.

Our recommendation is simple:

The future of identity is now. Waiting means wasting valuable time to learn. Most importantly, we urge our clients to reinforce their 1P and open web connections to publishers and start to build metrics and benchmarks for new ways of reaching their consumers. Running experiments at scale is what digital advertising technology allows us to do. Let’s take advantage of that and learn what works and what doesn’t, gather insights into how KPIs and benchmarks are changing.

Our teams put together an Identity Playbook to guide marketers and agencies through this process. Some of our clients have already tested the approach. They invested scaled media budgets and worked with their preferred providers to establish initial benchmarks and to gather valuable insights. That will give them an edge in tomorrow’s market.  It puts them into a position to curate the market they need to thrive in the future of digital marketing.