Originally published on The Drum.

The era of the third-party cookie is coming to an end. On line, Safari and Firefox have already started blocking them, and Chrome will finish phasing out support next year. Meanwhile, on mobile, Apple announced last year that iOS 14 would require app users to opt in to be identified to advertisers.

The implications of this are huge. Advertisers will lose the ability to deliver relevant messages to the right person, hitting revenue. They’ll be less able to optimise campaigns in-flight, increasing costs. They’ll be powerless to cap the frequency of individual ads, increasing waste and degrading the customer experience. And they’ll be unable to measure the effectiveness of their ads, plunging them back into the dark ages of advertising.

MediaMath believes that all this change creates the perfect opportunity to build a new online advertising ecosystem, one that delivers better accuracy and efficiency for brands, greater privacy for consumers, and sustainable revenues for publishers. How we get there is the subject of MediaMath’s Identity Playbook: Preparing Brands & Agencies for a New Era. The playbook explains the two options for the future – first-party user IDs (1P ID) and aggregation solutions. And it sets out what brands need to do to thrive in the cookie-less future.

In the playbook, you’ll learn:

  • the pros and cons of 1P ID and aggregation solutions;
  • the challenges of building an ecosystem based on 1P IDs;
  • the steps brands need to take in choosing an ID partner;
  • why the time to start your transition to 1P IDs is now.

MediaMath will be discussing first-party user identities and their Identity Playbook at The Drum’s Digital Transformation Festival in March.