Page 35 - Adnews Magazine November-December 2021

5 minutes with...
AdNews sits down with Xandr senior account director Erica Blakslee
to discuss the implications of a privacy-first future on programmatic transparency, targeting and trading.
in partnership with
35
How will transparency be affected across the supply chain by the shift to the privacy-first landscape?
In a privacy-first world, one of the by-products is more fragmentation given the existence of multiple uni- versal identifiers and the need to work with a number of different partners to replicate what you do today. This fragmentation makes it more difficult to achieve transpar- ency, because you need to engage multiple partners that bring unique elements to the table. This makes for a more complex supply chain with more moving parts within it.
Being able to consolidate that, finding the partners that are bring- ing something different, but also those that are willing to provide you that transparency, is crucial because you need to know not only how much spend is making it down to the publishers, but where your brand is being placed. This com- plexity does make things more challenging, but aligning with the right partners is important in order to be able to adapt to an ever-evolving landscape.
How can buyers ensure they continue to serve relevant advertising to consumers in the post- cookie environment?
One of the mistakes we make as an industry is talking about the death of the cookie as if it’s a future event, but, in reality, the cookie is already gone. Safari and Firefox don’t have cookies today and
“One of the mistakes we make as an industry is talking about the death of the cookie as if it’s a future event, but, in reality, the cookie is already gone.”
trading on attention metrics is gathering serious momentum. It’s impor- tant for buyers to test contextual solutions, and start mapping the most effective to other parts of the conversion funnel.
Secondly, think through data. First-party data is going to define the next wave of advertising. If you’re a direct-to-consumer brand, or if you’re a bank or telco, then you have a lot of rich first-party data. It’s about making sure that you can activate at scale using purpose-built platforms and making sure that the data is in an actionable state.
Measurement is going to become challenging, because we’ve built a whole attribution system around last-touch and the cookie, and arguably this is one of the most broken parts of the industry. It’s the part that leads to misaligned incentives. It skews how algorithms work and it skews how businesses get paid out. Now is a good chance to fix that, and the outcome will lead to more relevant advertising.
How can a curated marketplace help buyers navigate their way around fragmentation of publisher first-party data? Fragmentation means you have to go to the first publisher you work with and say, “I’m looking for this audience” then the second publisher, then the third and so on. You essentially have islands of data that each pub- lisher owns and that only works on their inventory. Then when you con- sider also requiring contextual targeting and various Industry IDs in order to reach a specific target audience, that can mean a trader has a ton of individual Deal IDs and open exchange supply to target. That’s complex and time consuming.
Rather, you could use a curated marketplace to essentially choose from a catalogue of pre-negotiated PMPs and open exchange supply from every publisher and curate them into one single deal ID, and then push that into the DSP for trading. The trader now only has one deal ID and they can target and report on the audiences across multiple publishers at scale.