Media Briefing: With the looming cookie apocalypse, ‘fully prepared’ publishers are going it alone, while others want to band together

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber checks in on publishers’ post-cookie preparations.

Half-baked
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Half-baked

The key hits:

The New York Times is taking a “conservative” approach to assessing potential solutions to the third-party cookie exit.
The Atlantic is “fully prepared” for the demise of the third-party cookie and has not opted into any data consortium.
Daily Mail is expecting to use a mix of solutions and has already seen a 69% increase in programmatic revenue from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022 after starting to use a probabilistic data alternative to third-party cookies.

A little more than a year before Google officially starts to phase out third-party cookies in its Chrome browser — unless it delays yet again — publishers are facing the approaching deadline amid an unsettled ad tech and privacy landscape.

The publishers most confident in their post-cookie preparations seem to be the ones going it alone. But not all media companies, particularly those without a strong subscription business or shallower first-party data set, are awarded that luxury. And those latter publishers are feeling less prepared at this point.

The Atlantic and The New York Times are two publishers sitting relatively pretty thanks to their respective subscription businesses and the corresponding first-party data sets those businesses provide.

“We are fully prepared for the cookie apocalypse,” The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson told Digiday a couple weeks ago. “We have a strong, cohesive, well-organized plan to transition to first-party data that emcompasses our live events, our advertising, our consumer business and our data science team.”

The New York Times, too, seems very secure in the ability its first-party data has in driving its advertising business forward. The publisher has even taken a hard stance against vendors trying to swoop in and take some of the share of the market that media companies are in position to control with their datasets in a post third-party cookie internet.

“We have a saying, ‘What happens on The Times stays on The Times,’” said Lisa Howard, global head of advertising at The New York Times. “We’ve been on this little exploration of our own proprietary data products and I think we’re bucking the trend a little bit there in that we don’t work with any third-party partners on the ad targeting side. We’re building it all ourselves.”

But other publishers are seeking strength in numbers.

The third-party cookies’ removal from all major browsers may benefit publishers by making advertisers more reliant on their audience data for targeting purposes. But given the choppy waters of the current ad tech and privacy seascape as well as the scale challenge of clean rooms as a post-cookie solution, publishers without big enough data boats could benefit from being part of an industry-wide armada.

“Industry standards should be adopted as much as possible,” said Jeremy Gan, svp of revenue operations at Daily Mail. “Publishers with resources should band together and compare notes openly in …read more

Source:: Digiday