Here at Teads, cookieless is part of everyday life. Since the launch of our cookieless solutions in 2020, we’ve taken every opportunity to evolve our client’s campaigns to be future proof and immune to the challenges of rapidly evolving technological updates and ever-changing regulations.
Our publisher relationships grant us access to billions of contextual data signals on a daily basis. Not only has this allowed us to create market leading contextual targeting solutions but as cookieless became a reality, these contextual signals formed the basis of our cookieless solution set. From the Teads predictive audiences to the highly acclaimed Cookieless Translator, our contextual infrastructure is at the heart of everything we do.
After countless campaigns, rigorous testing and the creation of products that are now in their 2nd or 3rd generation, we can confidently say that cookieless solutions work. They deliver scale, exceptional results against media KPIs and consistent brand lift vs. their cookie-based counterparts. Across verticals, the evolution to cookieless by default has been a positive experience for brands and advertisers, with the following demonstrating what we’ve seen in that time.
- 70% of all data driven campaigns at Teads are now using cookieless technology
- 90% of the Teads standard audience taxonomy are cookieless ready
- 65% of all custom audiences built and used at Teads are using cookieless signals
So what have we learned in that time and what can we pass on to those who are still missing out on the ‘majority’ of impressions in many key global markets?
The Scale is There, We Need to Overcome Misconceptions
One of the biggest learnings we have experienced as an industry is that the word ‘cookieless’ – if broken down – has the word ‘less’ in it. Despite cookieless campaigns delivering superb results, the challenge that this new technology was somehow inferior to cookie-based campaigns resulted in a hesitancy from many to make the move and switch based on the name. The irony is that ignoring cookieless solutions meant (and means) ignoring the majority of audiences consuming content on Apple devices. So what’s in a name? For some, missed opportunity, for others, scale into a quality audience that earns more, spends more and travels more.
Reviving the Data-Powered Programmatic Landscape
At some point over the past decade, the data-driven programmatic ecosystem got lost. Audience modeling created untenable, inflated segments that defied common sense as they scaled to double, triple, and even quadruple the entire population of any given market or geography. Terminology such as deterministic data became a moniker for quality, giving rise to the notion that anything probabilistic was, quite simply, bad.
The challenge we needed to overcome was to demonstrate that modeling is going to be a necessary part of a cookieless future. As there won’t be one single replacement for the 3rd party cookie, advertisers need to embrace modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence driven audiences to find scale. To overcome this challenge, trust needs to be rebuilt in the modeling process itself. To earn this trust, Teads created the Cookieless Translator which demonstrates how audiences are made, as well as the composition of the new solutions.
Adapting Programmatic Practices for Cookieless Audiences
It is important to understand that cookieless audiences do come with trade-offs. To reach the bigger audiences (e.g. Safari users) the cost is breaking habits and well-established programmatic practices are needed and creating hesitancy to switch to cookieless audiences. From global frequency capping to 3rd party driven audiences, campaigns designed for cookieless environments need to be careful about the application of solutions driven by 3rd party cookies. At Teads, our advertisers’ campaigns show up across the articles of high quality publications, and since articles aren’t re-read frequently our organic frequency cap (how many people we reach without applying any cap) is 2-3 unique users per month.
Moving Beyond Testing
In the beginning, we had a flourish of testing across a large number of our advertisers. Testing proved successful in many cases and advertisers saw stellar results. But then the delays from Google came and decision to phase out cookies was delayed by Google, meaning that the decision to make the switch was equally delayed as well.. If we have learned anything at Teads it’s to make sure that advertisers have an end goal for their testing and to ensure that once a testing schedule is complete, we move to a ‘cookieless by default’ state. To help with this process, Teads has moved ~90% of our standard audiences to a blend of cookie and cookieless signals. Our Cookieless translator allows advertisers to see the potential reach limitations if 3rd party cookie campaigns aren’t translated (and scaled) and above all, Teads now approaches cookieless as an ‘opt-out’ situation vs. an ‘opt-in’ situation as it was some 18 months ago.
Simplifying Audience Targeting
If this transition to cookieless has proven anything, it is that we’re all fascinated, arguably fixated, on the need to understand how audiences are built and the level of scrutiny has been as high as ever,most likely driven by trust issues (see above). Our focus at Teads now is to get back to what we, as advocates of the marketing discipline, use targeting for in the first place. Reaching an audience, or context that we believe achieves our marketing and business objectives. At Teads, we’re focused on simplifying this to three things; own the page, own the moment or own the audience. By addressing the overarching reason why we’re advertising in the first place, we believe the transition to cookieless will be a simpler one and simplicity is never a bad thing!
Navigating Uncertainty and Advancing Toward a Cookieless Future
The final learning is to say that we’ve all got a long way to go with just over a year remaining. With a constantly changing landscape (both in tech and regulation) and the maturity of some cookieless solutions still in their infancy, it’s fair to say that there are still many unknowns to work through. While we have work to do to ensure that cookieless by default is universally applicable across everything that we do, it’s fair to say that the majority of our data-driven business at Teads is already operating in a cookieless ready state, meaning that we are ready for whatever comes next.
To find out how you can turn these learnings into action, sign up to be the first to receive the Cookieless Activation Guide here.
James Colborn, Global VP Data, Teads