Teads Introduces the First Cookieless Platform for the Open-Web

In November, we announced that Teads Ad Manager (TAM) has become the first cookieless platform on the open web. This is a big milestone for us as a business and for the industry as it gives all of our advertiser, agency and publisher partners a huge advantage in today’s cookieless world.

As we’ve discussed a lot this year, cookieless is already a reality driven by browser, in-app and legal changes. Today, around 40% of the global web traffic* are not using 3rd party cookies.

This means that almost half of your consumers can only be engaged using cookieless solutions.

Due to the nature of the text-based environments that our ads are served in, Teads Ad Manager has had a number of sophisticated cookieless capabilities for a long time now. So our recent work has been focused on developing a number of core new functionalities for cookieless planning, targeting, delivering and reporting, which are outlined below:

Targeting cookieless audiences

For standard targeting requirements, such as demographic or interest-based targeting, you can immediately leverage an off-the-shelf catalogue of over 100 Teads cookieless audiences. Behind the scenes, each audience was engineered by smartly combining our Teads predictive audiences with the latest cookieless initiatives from the industry. Simply put, we allow you to target key audiences in cookieless environments.

To address custom or 1st-party audience targeting needs, we have developed an innovative new product allowing you to target such audiences without cookies: the Teads Cookieless Translator.

Within the translator, you simply select your cookie-based seed audience. The tool then analyzes the profile of each user from this audience across all the relevant cookieless combinations, such as the type of content and websites they visit, the type or model of device they use, etc. The translator then provides an actionable list of cookieless recommendations that can be turned into media activation in a single click, triggering the creation of the related cookieless audience.

Effective Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting is all about capturing the highest moments of receptivity of consumers, leveraging the content of the page to amplify your marketing message and ensure a greater level of attention.

At Teads we perform a semantic analysis of each and every publisher page to accurately classify it into the relevant content categories from our catalogue of over 500 different segments. Our inRead placement, located in the heart of editorial content, puts us in a unique position to take the most of this demonstrably effective targeting strategy. Teads’ contextual solution is simply the right placement at the right moment for your brand.

Actionable throughout the marketing cycle

Making cookieless easy is a crucial step for making it accessible for our agency and advertiser partners. To do so, we created a single button that switches our platform into ‘Cookieless Mode’. Once this has been selected, a number of changes are made within TAM:

• Only cookieless targeting solutions are available
• The planning gauge only take cookieless signals into account
• Separate reporting is available to isolate and compare the media effectiveness of the cookieless activation.

To summarize, in just a few clicks, you can immediately deliver 100% of your impressions using sustainable data practices, or A/B test cookie-based and cookieless activation to help your business transformation and be prepared for this new era.

Across 2021, we have delivered over 1Bn impressions through our cookieless solutions, and delivered over 50 cookieless A/B tests with some of the world’s top clients. Two types of A/B tests were conducted:

• Cookieless audience vs cookie-based audience
• Contextual targeting vs cookie-based audience targeting

Success was either measured by running brand uplift studies, or by using standard media KPIs such as view-through-rate or in-view-time. Here is what we’ve learned so far:

Our initial results showed a higher brand uplift for cookieless compared to cookie-based activations across all funnel metrics (such as recall, awareness, purchase intent, etc.).

This can come as a  surprise as we are comparing cookie-based technologies that have been around for 20 years, with fairly new cookieless solutions.

To interpret these results though we have to keep in mind that cookies give a precise view of the user profile using past, historical information. One challenge is that it may no longer reflect the interest or the intent of the user at the time of the ad exposure.

However, by design cookieless is all about the here and now, all about precisely the right moment to engage with a user. And finding that right moment, as we all know, is the key to driving higher attention, engagement and therefore media effectiveness.

Media KPIs are observed as being equivalent between cookie-based and cookieless campaigns. This is a strong testimony to the capabilities of the Teads AI to optimize campaign performance without the need for cookies.

It’s honestly not an overstatement to say that these results represent significant positive news for the entire media industry.

We have proven that cookieless activations and media effectiveness are possible, and we can confidently enter this new era without the fear of losing the impact that current online marketing campaigns are delivering. You can do this today by participating in our cookieless readiness program; or by using our self-serve interface Teads Ad Manager, the first cookieless platform for the open-web.

If you would like to speak to us directly about using TAM to help you transition into the cookieless world, please contact our data team who will be able to discuss the next steps for your business.

Remi Cackel, Chief Product Officer, Teads