“The ability to transact cookieless is where we need to be going, but we need to start experimenting immediately,” said Jennifer Scheel, executive vp and head of programmatic at Dentsu, which has worked with OpenX on its OpenAudience platform, launched in 2019, and has previewed the Cookieless Deal Library.
Differentiating with alt IDs
SSPs have been proving their value by adding curation and audience data to enrich inventory. IDs and targeting have been moving to the sell side, since the publishers are those with the relationship with people to get consent, putting SSPs like OpenX—working with more than 130,000 premium publisher domains—in a beneficial position.
“It’s a good opportunity for SSPs to become more influential,” said Matthew McIntyre, global head of programmatic at EssenceMediacom. “They have the view of what is in the request, they can see all the connections and signals, and they then can use machine learning or curation to find the right inventory, which is powerful.”
The negative, he added, is that getting busy agencies to use a library proactively could be difficult.
There are so many third-party cookies buried in the backend of different solutions that performance testing is going to be hard to fully rely upon.
Loch Rose, chief analytics officer at Epsilon
To be sure, there are plenty of marketplaces from SSPs that include data-enriched inventory (other flavors include Index Exchange’s recent Marketplaces) and libraries where buyers can activate deal IDs on evergreen campaigns.
“[The library is] unique because we will be having detailed conversations on benchmarking with buyers and trying to drive feedback in the market,” said Sattel. Detail on the effectiveness of alt IDs, especially the new ones, is scant.
“That’s where this library hopefully will have better success [than former libraries], which have been more of a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality,” said Scheel. “It comes down to what is necessary to meet your client’s needs.”
Saving time, testing Topics
To run tests on the effectiveness of cookieless IDs outside of OpenX’s library, buyers need separate conversations with SSPs and providers. Any data-sharing agreement that’s needed requires significantly longer time, consuming legal teams, said Scheel, who estimates that the library is saving up to five hours of trading teams’ time.
