Across brands, agencies, publishers, SSP’s, DSPs, and CDPs, the ad tech industry has invested billions of dollars to find the right audiences, place media, and analyze results in an efficient manner. “Easy” is a word that comes to mind when one thinks of the Programmatic Media Practice.
However, “easy” has come at the cost of consumer privacy. As privacy awareness has grown, Apple and Google have taken the opportunity to invest in privacy-protecting platform commitments that are rewriting the ad tech landscape.
At the same time, over the past few years, privacy-focused users have been actively blocking ads, and a new breed of browsers now do that by default. Those users alone represent a data loss of 40–45% of traffic. Additionally, platform changes by Safari and Firefox disallow third-party cookies and IDs, creating a significant gap in ad technology.
With these developments, and the soon to be released changes coming to Chrome, iOS and Android, a shift needs to come in the way the industry thinks about data management and consumer monetization.
How does the ecosystem adapt and thrive?
Google recently released its “Publishers Playbook”, and quickly followed with an announcement of enhanced first-party privacy for Google Analytics. The company is limiting how consumers can be monetized across partner apps and sites. When these changes go live, content creators will be responsible for owning and managing their user data, and Google is offering the technology to let them do that as a co-processor.
Google’s long-term strategy, however, appears to use privacy as a vehicle to move non-Google monetization to the company, where it can serve as the technology provider, forcing SSPs and DSPs to build their own competing stacks or lose out to the monopoly engine.
You, as an SSP or DSP, may be hoping that third-party cookies, scripts like Prebid.js, or dropping a third-party ID on a device will continue, or, perhaps you are planning to work with a universal ID provider. But the sustainability of these solutions is rapidly diminishing as the major platforms announce policy updates that restrict their functionality. The entire idea of privacy fundamentally collides with the idea of a Universal ID. The signal is now clear: consumer data relationships are first-party, and this a compliance requirement.
Not everyone will react appropriately. Pubmatic’s Identity Hub approach of working with LiveRamp is essentially putting an expiry date on their entire business. Liveramp and Pubmatic do not have direct consumer relationships nor do they run any consumer technology to power such relationships. Companies will not be able to weasel out of the real obligations that these changes entail
What can be done?
Blotout has built an entire Analytics, Data Management, Ad Segmentation, ID Management, and AI/ML stack that addresses the disappearance of third-party cookies and IDs. We have established a model for managing data for the Privacy Conscious user that also provides significant upside benefit for the content creator. We are not enabling co-processing, we are enabling Controllers to manage and compute on their own data — one step further from what Google offers; independence!
This is the Blotout 360 Publishers Analytics Suite:
- Essential tools are deployed with a Privacy by Design mindset in a first-party Cloud Native Docker Container Server
- 100% Data Coverage — 1P direct and no cross-site tracker issues — Dark web and Privacy Browser coverage — This is a 45% lift compared to Google Analytics
- Cross Platform — supports Web, iOS, Android, React, and set-top-boxes providing a unified Customer View
- Development of User Advertising Segments via IAB Taxonomy; 20+ Languages supported for text classification
- Subscription Data Management and Profile Management with Data Governance built-in
- ML to develop lookalikes and fortify segment density for IAB and Demographic Segments
- 100+ data integrations, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk
- ID Management and Privacy Preserving ID Mapping with Partners in Container for Attribution
- Master Data Management, not just Consent Management; Real time Opt-Out
- Integrated CRM & Ad Serving On-Device — Turtledove out of the box by sync’ing Data Segments on-device via SDK
- No Co-Processing or CMP requirements offering worry free data compliance
SSPs are in the best position to affect change as they have the publisher relationships to build their own “Google-like” end-to-end system. A future-proof solution that replaces the need for Google is a far better approach than high-risk, privacy-encroaching workarounds, which every indicator suggests will fail anyway.
The Blotout Playbook lets you achieve 100% data coverage (including your Dark Web users), increased value extended to publishers, along with a future-proof solution that ensures business continuity. If you are wedded to Google , use Blotout to expand your views, data, and build a longer term foundation of data management and analytics spanning to every consumer.
Learn more.
What about Safari?
We are already seeing ad spend in the open marketplace drop by 50–70% for users on Safari, as Apple has made a stance to limit cookies to a single session. Only a first-party solution returns these coveted users to SSP publishers and media buyers, enabling a return of as much as 20–40% spend in their portfolio.
Want to test it out?
Just reach out to sales@blotout.io with Subject: Access to Docker Image and we can make a container available to you to try it out. Alternatively, ask us to help you deploy for free on your Cloud accounts. All it takes is 15 seconds once image is downloads to bring future to your Sites and Apps.