Imagining Life After Cookies With LiveRamp’s Deb O’Sullivan

In just 12 months’ time, third-party cookies are expected to be nothing more than a distant memory. Google has vowed to deprecate cookies from Chrome by 2022, meaning the industry is busy preparing for a new world of identity.

What this future will look like is the big question.

According to LiveRamp Vice President, Enterprise Sales ANZ Deb O’Sullivan, this shift will ultimately benefit the consumer.

“The removal of third-party cookies and other unsustainable identifiers will see the industry move towards solutions that support a consumer-centric ecosystem that facilitates the essential value exchange between publishers, marketers, and consumers.

Businesses and brands that don’t make that move will find it much more difficult to maintain and sustain key marketing workflows, like targeting, attribution, frequency capping, and measurement, to name a few. In order to continue executing data-driven marketing, marketers require durable addressable solutions.

In terms of facilitating this shift towards people-based marketing, various advertising technology companies are experimenting with new identity solutions.

The Trade Desk is busy preparing the Unified ID 2.0, Lotame is working on Panorama ID, while Google recently provided the industry with an update on its Privacy Sandbox.

It’s created a competitive market where consumer privacy is a high priority.

And unlike life with cookies, where online identity – and digital advertising more broadly – was characterised by a single solution, life after cookies will be different, according to O’Sullivan.

“We don’t think the industry will move forward with one solution to rule them all. Rather, a few identity solutions that enable marketers to continue to be able to execute critical workflows — targeting, attribution, frequency capping, suppression, etc. — across environments. Multiple IDs should come from the martech community and enable marketers to make the best possible connection with their data to publisher inventory,” O’Sullivan told B&T.

“To support a neutral, interoperable, and privacy-conscious ecosystem, there is a need for the industry to collaborate and build a technology stack that can scale alongside growth and support infrastructure that is widely adopted by publishers and industry platforms.”

Privacy Sandbox

Given Chrome’s browser market share, Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox is naturally expected to gain significant uptake.

Earlier this year, the company shared information about early progress that has been made on the sandbox, revealing the technology will allow advertisers to create and deploy their own advertisers and measure campaign performance without using cookies.

According to O’Sullivan, the industry will have to wait and see whether the Privacy Sandbox is an effective industry-wide solution moving forward.

“The industry is still evaluating Privacy Sandbox. Increased transparency and interoperability will be key to making its tools a positive step for the industrym,” she said.

O’Sullivan also suggested that future versions of Google Chrome might have reduced personalisation capabilities, meaning customer relationships will become increasingly important.

“At this point we do know, with some degree of certainty, that Chrome will not support individual one-to-one personalisation or measurement. This is why we strongly believe that marketers and publishers should look to create trusted consumer relationships rooted in authentication to continue to be able to personalise the consumer journey in a manner similar to the walled gardens,” she said.

“There is urgency and momentum now to explore Sandbox and what it entails. Now is the time for marketers to assess their options and the potential impact to their marketing practices.”

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