I want cookies… said no RFP ever!

When was the last time you requested cookies in your brief or RFP when building out a campaign? Chances are, that is probably never happened! The most likely scenario is that you asked for an audience (or series of audiences) that you believe will relate to your product, service or offering. 

Why is it then that we’re all so fascinated with cookie deprecation? Even more so, why is it that we’re so despondent and negative about the slow death of the small piece of code that has facilitated [yet also damaged along the way] our advertising ecosystem?

Do the replacement ‘cookieless’ solutions have a perception problem? Are we concerned that somehow the cookie-less solution will be inferior to our existing cookie-enabled audiences? Is it because we read daily news stories of pending doom and catastrophic failings for programmatic without cookies and how Google’s Privacy Sandbox will result in some form of loss for every programmatic player due to its inability to match exactly what third-party cookies do today? The answer to all of these questions is probably yes! 

With only a few months left until we face this inevitable future, it’s time to change the narrative. We CAN survive cookie deprecation, and we WILL prosper as an ecosystem with solutions that don’t need cookies. 

At this point, you may be wondering where this confidence in a cookieless future is coming from. Well, the reality is… it’s not a future state; it’s a now state. If your open web advertising is predominantly mobile-based (and mobile browser-based), chances are your advertising will be impacted by cookie deprecation for YEARS! So much so that companies like Teads have spent the last 3 years building solutions that deliver audiences to marketers using a different recipe. A recipe that is proving to work. 

In Q4 of 2023, eMarketer (citing 33Across) reported that in most verticals, less than 20% of the programmatic budget was spent using cookieless alternatives; Teads delivered 78% of all targeted campaigns using cookieless signals. While programmatic operators and advertising technologies are still resisting the change, Teads quietly went about shifting how we do what every media company does: selling audiences to marketers that meet their campaign objectives. 

By embracing the strength of our direct publisher relationships and developing TeadsAI to develop new and innovative ways to create audiences, Teads has managed to prepare our advertisers for this cookieless state and, along the way, take advantage of the huge swathes of inventory available in environments like Safari and Firefox. Have these audiences performed badly? Are they inferior for advertisers? Absolutely not. Teads has seen equivalent if not better results for cookieless audiences over cookied audiences. 

So, the industry needs a mindset shift. A positive outlook on the fact that it is possible to advertise in 2024 and more importantly, advertise without cookies. To do this we need to build trust in algorithms and how AI (Machine Learning)  will replace the cookie with viable alternatives. In a world where mystery algorithms and “trust us” type solutions have created unfathomable segment sizes and solutions, we need to build this trust with transparency. 

As we stand on the brink of a cookieless era, it’s crucial to embrace the evolving digital landscape with optimism and adaptability. The shift from reliance on cookies to innovative, AI-driven solutions is not just a challenge to overcome but an opportunity to forge deeper, more meaningful connections in the advertising world.

Curious to explore Teads Data Suite, driven by Contextual Intelligence? Tune in to hear Jes Donohue, Teads’ VP of Data, North America, discuss it in our ‘Talk With Teads‘ segment.

Written by James Colborn, Global VP, Data at Teads.