The future of digital marketing in a cookie-less world

[Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] that's great music welcome everyone and thank you so much for tuning in i'm josh golden the president and publisher for ad age and today you're joining us for a publisher's fireside conversation about the future of digital marketing in a cookie-less world something with which i would be sad to see go because i'm a big fan of the post-lunch cookie this is a different cookie but i still have a fan uh as you're watching this today let us know in the chat uh from where where you're tuning in from and we'll give you a shout out a little later in the program all right let me set the table on this topic because it's a little complex and i want to make sure we said it well at the very beginning of 2020 when the world was normal news broke of the looming apocalypse in the marketing industry and and then of course the corona pandemic which made it even worse uh the other disaster they're making of course was those google's announcement and the planned removal of third-party cookies from its chrome browser and then mozilla's elimination of the cookies from firefox in 2019 and then of course apple uh decided to ban cookies as well within safari in march as well as now they have some new um a new uh a new cookie a piece as well within their own platform on ios combined with the competition combination of gdpr privacy regulations in various states such as the california consumer protect privacy act which went into effect on january 1st the death of the cookie was greeted outside the walled gardens as a virtual extinction level event for an ecosystem built on audience targeting and omnichannel attribution access such as third part that such as the third party data is provided so how can you prepare your organization for the ecosystem of partners platforms and consumers that surround you in the next disruption today i'm joined by michael shone svp and gm of marketing solutions at nustar and varun baguan vp of product management and engineering adds data at verizon media gentlemen thank you so much for the for joining me for this conversation yeah thank you for having us thanks for having us josh you are welcome you are welcome i'm i am i know this is uh you know uh when you sort of look at the the the uh i i'm feeling like the year has been certainly interesting uh but at the beginning of the year this was the key topic that everyone was so desperate to to understand and then also start to conserve to to potentially combat so thinking about this in particular i want to make certain that everyone has a base level of understanding um of what it means and then also what it could mean into the future so michael i'll start with you so why is the elimination of the third party cookie and then even more now with idfa with apple's new protocol that they're actually going to be blocking third-party cookies such a big deal for marketers can you just set the stage and then with that then then if you can add on how has it specifically impacted new scar new stars you know um core business strategy sure yeah absolutely so you know so the the deprecation of the third-party cookie and the elimination of apple's idfa or mobile ad id these are important because those identifiers have really formed the basis of how digital marketing has been executed honestly since the start and it's the way that marketers are able to both target audiences and measure the impact of digital advertising and it's always been kind of the attractive nature of digital advertising has been the ability to specifically target and measure those interactions and so marketers are understandably very concerned about what's going to happen when those identifiers go away in terms of you know new start strategy the reality has been that these identifiers specifically third-party cookies never actually worked all that well and so nustar has been pursuing a strategy to think about what are more effective ways for us to be able to accomplish those same same goals of communicating effectively to your audience and then measuring the impact and so at the start of 2020 when google announced the deprecation of the third party cookie and the rumors were swirling that apple was going to eliminate their mobile ad id um we were thinking this is great 2020 is going to go exactly according to plan and so i apologize we will never think that ever again obviously this year has been very different from what we expected um but you know the the impact of on digital marketing um is honestly you know is exactly in accordance with what we had expected interesting and yeah and so you know our strategy has always been um let's think about uh marketing more holistically digital marketing is one component of our clients marketing strategies um and you need to recognize that when you think about marketing the channels in which you are looking to communicate with and measure your customer interactions um have not always been uh very open to their product cookies anyway in particular the wall gardens sure not allowed third-party cookies video advertising has been harder to measure with cookies um and so we've been we've been focused on a strategy of identity and integrations that allowed us to kind of effectively deliver on those on those interactions varun let me just pivot to you for a moment you know obviously this world has changed dramatically with without sort of even considering the election is sort of in there as well how you know how how how has verizon media sort of taken on given that you're such a large if such like platforms that you own how are you addressing this particular challenge and then what specifically strategically have you shifted to think about how you may be addressing next year uh that's a good question so uh i agree with a lot of what michael shared just now from our standpoint and you know in the world of ad tech we have the saying that not all data is equal similarly not everyone in our ecosystem is as impacted by these changes and we we believe we are in actually a very fortunate position with the house of brands that we have uh with the user base that we have and the investments that we're making as part of our strategy into both ctv and digital are the home as the emerging channels for us those are things that will carry us really well into uh into the next year we're already seeing uh some of those bear fruit and as some of these uh changes uh go through uh we expect to see even more amazingness coming out of our platforms that's awesome i'm just curious knowing that you have access to so many different things beyond digital of course you know have you considered um how you might apply privacy regulations that are new i mean past as of the last election cycle how are you considering those new privacy regulations and what you're going to be doing with verizon media in particular uh that's a good question um you know we are actually in a very fortunate position from that standpoint given the tech foundation that we have that's super strong uh and in fact since the time gdpr it feels like forever ago it was like 2018 uh came onto the scene we four saw similar regulatory changes coming up uh in multiple places and we're already seeing that with california ccpa different states uh drafting their own uh regulatory frameworks uh lgpd from brazil et cetera coming up so what we did was at that time we created a robust centralized plan uh to uh first and foremost provide transparency to consumers uh second to obviously uh abide by the laws and the regulations and to meet them uh and third is support the need of our advertisers and our publisher uh partners so that's something that we embarked on back then and because of all the tech work that we did at that time we are able to seamlessly and relatively painlessly carry forward as new regulations come up over time varun and michael as as you were saying that um both of your answers i was starting to think about y2k uh and how we all you know were so worried about y2k and then it really didn't have this impact i'm concerned for the marketers that are you know that are listening as well as agency leaders uh and and brand marketers that maybe this is this this is going to be more important and because obviously everyone knows we need to be keeping you know obviously data is important and there's been large breaches that have happened and that that you know concerning the privacy is obviously important for brand marketers to pay attention to so michael this is for you so um how can marketers shouldn't our market is underreacting to this i guess is the first question and then the second question is you know how do they they start to build that profile on their own infrastructure to sort of capture as much data as they can yeah i mean so you know i think in general there's there's still confusion amongst marketers i think the strategy that varun just laid out um is an effective one which is you know marketers are looking at how they can really unify their own customer data strategy so they can be better positioned to leverage the first party data that they have access to i think what we're going to see is a great application of additional techniques that will allow marketers to still be able to leverage data in a way that is respectful of consumer privacy um so a new star as part of our our launch of fabric we've been leveraging a lot of differential privacy techniques um which you come from computer science and data science and it provides an opportunity for leveraging the insights that come from consumer data without having to expose any individual level consumer data interesting so do you feel you you mentioned the beginning there's a little bit of an under-reaction um do you varun do you do you echo that uh in the customers you're having conversations with as well you know uh you said it at the start josh that both firefox and safari already do away with third-party cookies and marketers and publishers do see that today that loss however they don't see it as starkly as they otherwise would why because a lot of the demand shifted over to chrome when chrome goes away they will see it massively and there are studies that have established there there's going to be a 50 plus loss uh in cpms uh for even the largest publishers right so no one is going to be immune to this seismic event that is going to come upon us at some point in 22. and we do see frankly cookie loss is going to be a net negative for the industry most likely but for us as whereas in media we actually expect to be stronger after that compared to the independent tech providers we have our publisher data that's super tightly integrated uh with our ad tech platform and we all operate exactly as michael said with the same first party cookie and that allows us to preserve all of our audience targeting capabilities at scale across the ecosystem so sorry go ahead i'll just say so it seems like they're going to be some real good solutions for people to to jump to from where they cur we're sort of relying on now to a solution into the future it just seems like there's a little bit of a hesitation to make that leap yeah uh i i don't want to uh uh undercut the changes that third party cookies will bring up uh and for that reason we have a three-prong strategy and a solution for it first is tied to persistent identity where you know most of our users are logged in across one or more of our brands and that allows us to not only have the identity piece but also the data piece in a consented way that's key but at the same time we fully recognize that there's going to be a large part of the supply that will not have any addressability and so we have actually been working over the past year on some of the ai and ml techniques similar to what michael talked about that allow us to rebuild some of the audience targeting constructs but without having any identity uh in it whatsoever yeah thank you for an amazing promise for us that's fascinating i just want to welcome everyone again to the conversation today i'm josh golden the president publisher for ad age and i have with me today michael schoen svp and gm of marketing solutions at nustar and varun beguan vp of product mark uh product management and engineering ads data at verizon media and today we're discussing of course how to live without the all-important cookie uh and today we have uh watching with us i got i got the list of folks uh just a few that i'll be shouting out let's see natasha from illinois abigail from north carolina adam from poland what's up poland um asman from tanzania a vet from florida stephen from canada thomas from california and anor from in symbol uh thank you all for tuning in for today by the way if you anyone has any questions for these two very very smart individuals um i will uh we're opening up the q a portion uh a little later and i want to make sure we get some good good ones in because frankly i think this is a topic that i don't know whether adage can cover enough of because it is clearly uh you know an important topic that is i think uh people are kind of sitting on their heels on a waiting and and trying to educate themselves on so i'm hopeful that this conversation is helpful in that particular case um vroom i'm going to go to the next question for you so as a publisher living inside you know of verizon media which is responsible for huffpo and yahoo which was my original you know email uh and aol uh obviously you have access to a wide amount of first-party data which has obviously become extremely uh important um so so i guess for you the the cookie apocalypse is really kind of good is that is that a good way to think about it for you guys uh absolutely um you know i said earlier like not all data is equal uh similarly for us uh the data that we do have is at scale it's differentiated uh it's fully consented uh and a lot of the third-party data that we use we can rely uh on continuity in our ad tech platform without uh that third-party data coming in there are going to be challenges when it comes to measurement when it comes to attribution at scale especially across the entire landscape of the attack platform and those are some certain set of things that we need to think about that's also a third part of our strategy which is tied to partnerships even though we are trying to maximize uh the uh uh the delivery through uh our attack ecosystem for marketers uh and for publishers uh at the same time we recognize that there's a need uh to partner within our ecosystem uh to make sure that we can have sustainability of the marketplace uh over time very interesting uh uh michael i'm gonna come to you on this one because uh varun mentioned you know the kind of capacity for um the different ways for people to access data about you know with with uh you know so many different ways of getting that at that data and now even with the pandemic everyone's changed their i mean i'm using my devices i couldn't imagine using it more but i'm using it more and my streaming television now i'm using that more and everything has become more from a digital perspective so it seems to me that privacy restrictions are making the old way of tracking the consumer really not possible anymore and i'm you know i really want you to i want to highlight you know a way that we can that a marketer can can effectively understand and how to address consumers that are now multi-layered on multiple multiple different platforms right yeah so that's a challenge that we at nustar have been really focused on so our launch of new star fabric earlier this year was really focused on how we can tie together all of those different threads and weave them into a single ecosystem solution as roon mentioned it you know a lot of it has to do with partnership so how can we effectively partner with the wall gardens with programmatic advertising with big media partners like verizon in order to ensure that we have an ecosystem that is sustainable even without third party cookies and then on top of fabric we're providing solutions that help address the challenges that that josh you just laid out um so in this in this world in which consumers are across all their devices how can you still effectively reach them and ensure that you're actually targeting the right audiences and then how do you effectively measure the impact of your marketing um you know that's always been a challenge it's even greater now when you know folks are being exposed to marketing messages on their phones on their tablets on their connected connected tvs um and we've we've woven the concept of fabric now across our analytics solutions and the solutions that allow us to help optimize customer experiences across all channels michael can anyone use fabric or is it really only for a smaller audience of individuals that have the capacity with the with a wide variety of data data points i'm just curious so the way we've constructed fabric is it is flexible so we really put the marker at the center of fabric so it you know the way we speak about it with a specific marker it's not really new stores fabric it's procter and gamble's fabric oh it's the fabric um and so we're able to leverage the first party data and the the customer interaction that any particular marketer has but for marketers that have less of that first party data we still provide the solution that enables effective targeting and measurement interesting varun i'm gonna go to you before we open up for q a um knowing that uh you know obviously publishers first party data is you know the real and most important piece obviously uh you know it's that once you once you have that you're you you have what you primarily need but i think there's other areas that you know we can explore i know the contextual targeting um is also important is that part of your strategy at all and maybe before we actually talk about contextual targeting maybe you can highlight for anyone who is a little unfamiliar with it how in fact that can work yeah so contextual targeting is uh it does not necessarily require uh any specific knowledge of the user rather it's more about uh historically at least what's more about what's on the page so if you're reading a a on a website about tennis then the marketer will see that as a contextual ad where they can if they have an offering for sports or tennis equipment whatever their ad can show up there without knowing anything really about the user and that's a reasonable way of overcoming some of the challenges with addressability now we all know it does not perform as well as addressable solutions and that's certainly a challenge for contextual but at the same time uh from platform standpoint uh we support all of the major vendors and their offerings across our platform and we plan to continue to do so in a quick less world as well uh now turns out uh uh yahoo got its start essentially being a contextual platform like that's when with mail right with mail with as they were actually the portal where people went to first corporate set of categories to figure out which website to go visit in the early days of the internet that's what yahoo was and that was really a contextual way of looking at things this is something that we've been doing for literally a couple of decades is understanding content analyzing it classifying it etc uh so what we're also doing is we recently made this available uh in our platform as our own content contextual offering fully integrated and available there today at the same time when there are no matched users we're also developing what i talked about earlier is the next gen uh audience solution offerings as well which have some contextual uh flavor and pixie dust in it but there's a lot more that goes into it yeah i can only imagine with the this complexity we did get a good question here uh for q a i want to throw it up here what new types of data sources do you think will be on the rise with the decline of third party data uh i i kind of like that idea uh sorry with addition of first party data benefit advertisers and optimizing their marketing tactics so is there gonna be a new data source uh that is um not necessarily your most obvious uh the the ones that you think of i'm curious this is fascinating for me is there some michael can you address this sure one thing we're seeing a lot of demand for um is increased use of what's referred to as second party data um so data that you're able to leverage from your commercial partners um so i think in the cpg space this may mean data that comes from retailers and then the obvious question is well you know how can you do that in a world where there's so many concerns around privacy and that's where again it comes up to differential privacy and clean rooms comes into play and we're partnering with folks across multiple industries to build clean room environments that allows marketers to share the effective insights that come from data without having to share the actual data itself so you get the the power of the data while still maintaining the privacy and security of the data that's uh that's right vernon you haven't thought of that one as well uh you know what's most valuable in a quick less world is your first party data what's the next best thing is someone else's first party data is the second party data right in addition to that uh i do feel uh there's going to be these are not new data sources but these are data sources tied to census data or other weather data or all of these other types of data that will get co-mingled into the data that we do have to get as close to a disability as possible the other piece that's not a data piece but it's how we use data in a safe protected way is aggregate data so meaning things won't necessarily happen at the user level or individual level but there will be a class of problems that we'll be able to solve using purely aggregate uh data not at the user level so that's the other type that i feel is going to get prominent i feel like there's so much here guys we could endlessly discuss this topic mostly because i think this is still an area that we're uncovering uh so i uh before we go i do want to ask you uh just quickly if you can just share with me either your favorite pandemic purchase or the thing you're streaming right now because i've found that this is helping me inspire my my weeks of watching i just watched the queen's gambit based on a suggestion from someone during one of these content strings so either you could tell me your favorite purchase or the thing you're streaming right now that you highly recommend so i i'm just finishing now streaming the west wing again so yeah i think it's season seven and and and the election is about to happen so that's very timely and it's been kind of an escape through the through the summer um queen's gambit is up next for me yeah it's awesome varun what do you got mandalorian i didn't get disney plus early on i got it and it's amazing i have to say it was i just haven't finished it yet but it's been excellent i've enjoyed it i want to thank both of you uh so much uh for joining me in this conversation i think it's really valuable and informative and frankly i think it's something that we need to talk more about as an industry because this is coming and we need to all all marketers and agencies and media companies like need to get on and publishers need to recognize this this is we're going to be no one wants it like a pan uh with a what's that like a like a pie in the face or pan in the face it's not fun either way thank you uh michael ashawn from newtown varun begun from verizon media for joining me today and thank you all for tuning in i really appreciate uh the audience and the questions that we received by the way if you've missed any of this conversation we'll be on age.com and you can see uh all this there thank you so much everyone and thank you for tuning in

Channel: AdAge

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Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020