Why Advertisers Should “Rewire” the Internet
In the race to replace cookies once Google eliminates them from its Chrome browser at some point late next year—barring any further delays, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of why we’re talking about cookies in the first place – the need for advertisers to disseminate and measure relevant advertising campaigns.
Let’s remember – advertisers didn’t create cookies and they ever really wanted to use them in the first place. Cookies were never designed for advertising. They were simply co-opted as the least-bad solution available. And they only cover the browsing internet, not the fastest growing channels in digital media, such as audio, apps, and streaming TV.
As we think about a world without cookies, it would be shortsighted to try and replace them with the same functionality because we can do so much better. We can build something that preserves the value exchange of relevant advertising for free content on the internet while massively upgrading consumer privacy. Advertisers have no interest in jeopardizing consumer trust. Many of them have spent decades building brand loyalty and don’t want to do anything that might put those relationships at risk.
It’s important to understand the internet is not free. Journalism outlets, for example, need to cover the costs of the reporters who produce news content. An new example is the streaming TV ecosystem being authenticated. We log in with our emails, so that streaming TV companies can either manage our subscriptions, or serve us relevant advertising — the new way to pay for TV. Almost all apps require us to log in. Increasingly, news sites ask us to authenticate with an email. This trend will only accelerate as publishers and advertisers reimagine the role of identity in a post-cookie, omni- channel context.
Why? Because almost all of these experiences are funded by advertising. And with authentication, we finally solve the foundational problem of cookies. Authentication, and the cross-channel identifiers that support it, such as Unified ID 2.0, allows advertisers to manage campaigns optimally across all channels. They can see, for example, if a certain audience group has seen a particular ad on a streaming platform, and then manage the frequency of that ad for the viewer across all channels. Savvy advertisers have no interest in bombarding users with the same ad over and over. They know it’s not good for their brand. But until now, they haven’t had great tools for managing that.
This dynamic also has the potential to greatly improve the consumer experience. Not simply because we won’t have to sit through the same ad over and over, but because ultimately we’ll see fewer, more relevant ads.
Media math of new kinds of case studies will become inevitable: Advertisers can serve fewer ads, and reach the right audience. The audience enjoys a more engaging, relevant advertising experience, i.e. native advertising, and the publisher gets to produce great content. and in so doing, the internet will effectively be rewired and friendlier. We will all be able to assess and improve the role that advertising plays in our internet-driven enterprise.