"Exploring New Strategies: Adapting to the Cookieless Future for Publishers"

Digital Advertising across the globe is going through a paradigm shift with the deprecation of third party cookies that is being unfolded through the year 2024. The broader impact of this shift is on digital advertising and publishing, including privacy regulations and restrictions on personally-identifiable device signals in the cookieless future

Given this market scenario how do large content publishers prepare themselves for this change, this is what we will try to address in this post.  Please note this post is being built with the prism of the Indian advertising market as in early 2024.

The large content publishers have by nature of their business vast compendium of quality content.  This is corroborated by the FICCI & EY annual report on the Media and Entertainment industry in India, 2024 edition.  In the report newspapers and broadcast news channels clearly rank as the most trusted news sources for the Indian audience. The same report also states that news sites garner only 3% of India’s digital advertising revenues. With the changes in advertising ecosystem it is important for the large publishers to defend and grow this revenues.  

With this let us see what are the steps should they take as a preparation for the cookie less world. 

1. The bright spot is contextual advertising, 13.8% annual growth predicted for by Statista Research as a result of cookie signals getting weaker driving digital advertisers will be relying on  contextual targeting.  Contextual targeting uses content, metadata, and usage data to infer user interests. Publishers should explore building a direct sales line through this approach.  

2. Publishers can provide richer data points with well indexed  contextual, vertical, and category data to enhance bidstream for advertisers on the various demand side platforms, improving targeting without third-party data.  

3. Use data clean rooms and broader data collaboration ecosystems to allow comparison of data sets without direct sharing, providing opportunities for collaboration and data enrichment.  

4. Third-party cookie deprecation presents challenges but also opportunities for publishers to leverage first-party data and direct audience access, emerging stronger than ever by smartly leveraging their unique assets.

Taking these steps will prepare the publishers to participate in alternative identity solutions that have been introduced in the market for data enrichment and execution. such as Trade Desk’s Universal ID.   At the same time equip the publishers to participate in Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, including its anonymised, interest-based Topics solution

Finally the publishers community will benefit from pooling in resources to collectively boost in scale and audience intelligence to benefit from the fast changing advertising ecosystem. Something for the industry bodies to think off.