Page 22 - Adnews Magazine May-June 2021

Investigation
entrench Google’s market power in online advertising.
In January this year, the CMA announced it would launch an investigation to assess whether the proposals to remove third- party cookies, and other tools, from Google’s browser could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.
Meanwhile, adtech companies who say they have seen the end of third-party cookies coming, have been pushing out their alternatives.
Liveramp has had its Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) out since May 2019. The iden- tity solution has rolled out to more than 340 publishers worldwide, up from about 30 just over a year ago, across the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Australia. Liveramp also says that more than 25 Supply-Side Platforms and 45 Demand-Side Platforms have adopted its ATS.
“[Google’s] announcement demonstrates that there’s a crucial importance of first-party data and developing strong direct-to-con- sumer relationships is important,” says Liveramp AUNZ director of addressability Louise Exton.
“And that’s something that LiveRamp has long been talking about. So, Google are already using the people-based identity for the most valuable inventory, which is Search and YouTube. And to remain competitive, other publish- ers should do the same and max- imise their authentications. So, LiveRamp’s focus remains the same, which is putting consumer privacy first and foremost.”
Meanwhile, Boh at Oracle says the business is still working out how it will be able to work with Google’s updates.
“We’re merging our martech and adtech suite and I think that’s important because we’ve been developing our customer data plat- form, and it appears, based off of Google’s announcements with FloC, is that they will still support first-party data workflows.
“So hopefully, as we try to test the integrations with FloC, we’ll be able to understand how those workflows will transpire and then
“Data is being exchanged, not captured. Effectiveness is becoming more probabilistically modeled and less directly tracked.” MediaCom head of digital Minsun Collier.
based off of what I know with what Google has said publicly, we intend to work with them on that.”
Boh says being unable to leverage traditional third-party data with FLoC will be a setback for players across the industry.
“This isn’t just a setback for Oracle, I think this is a setback for a lot of organisations,” he says.
“For us, we still have our contextual intelligence, which is the contextual advertising suite that we can rely on. We still intend to leverage third-party data that’s not based on cookies, and we’re exploring partnerships across the industry to help with the identity connections that are going to be required to work with other DSPs that will support third-party data activation.
“I think we’re moving into a season where if you’re a data company and your business was built on third-party cookies, there’s a good chance that going to have a tough time.”
The Trade Desk has its identity solution Unified ID 2.0 as another contender to help replace third-party cookies, and InMobi has launched its UnifID.
Meanwhile, Verizon Media has launched its unified identity solu- tion, Verizon Media ConnectID, to help advertisers buy, measure, and optimise ads while enabling publishers to manage, monetise and nav- igate audiences without third-party cookies.