Media Briefing: Publishers grapple with an existential crisis as they prepare for post-cookie landscape

By Tim Peterson

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why some publishers would prefer to completely reset the online ad market amid the third-party cookie’s demise rather than repeat the problems the cookie introduced.

Burning for control
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Burning for control

The key hits:

An email-centric post-cookie identity picture poses a problem for the overwhelming majority of publishers that will lack sufficient scale.
Non-email-based alternatives like curated marketplaces relying on contextual data present one option for publishers.
But the ultimate solution may be a complete reset of the online ad marketplace.

The web’s identity crisis is getting “pretty existential,” as one media executive put it.

Some publishers have already come to the conclusion that they will likely never accrue enough email addresses to replace the third-party cookie and satisfy advertisers’ demands for individual-level targeting. That assessment was made even more acute earlier this month when NBCUniversal announced its first-party data platform that the Comcast-owned conglomerate claims to span 150 million individuals.

“Email addresses aren’t going to scale on the open web with publishers like us,” said a second media executive. “For NBC, ABC, anybody with a CTV or streaming [property] or anywhere where you have to authenticate every time you use it, those are the people who will win in identity.”

The first media executive recalled a recent conversation with an executive at a large telecom company that had set a goal of accruing 40 to 50 million members of its existing customer base to opt into that company’s first-party data platform. “I think they got to 9 million,” relayed the media executive. Perceiving that this telecom would have had an advantage to load up on first-party data but only cracked 20% to 25% of its goal, “maybe the rest of us should not be chasing the scale game.”

“As marketers want to get more specific and understand and identify their audiences more, we’re going to struggle to figure out how to do that based on the scale of, essentially, the internet,” said a third media executive.

“On the data front, none of us have the scale of an NBC or a large TV player,” said a fourth media executive.

Where does that leave the broad swath of publishers then?

“Publishers should really consider burning the whole thing down,” said a fifth media executive. This person was joking. Sort of. While they and other media executives are not intending to torch the online advertising marketplace, they are hoping for something akin to the controlled burns that Native American tribes had conducted to avoid widespread wildfires and spur plant growth.

One way that could manifest is through publishers themselves opting out of email-based cookie alternatives. Some, like Insider, BuzzFeed and Group Nine, already are by refraining from building their respective first-party data platforms around email addresses. Others are looking to move more of …read more

Source:: Digiday