There are two enormous moments happening in digital media in 2024, and they both happen to coincide.
From a global societal perspective, the Olympics reaches the peak of its four-year cycle, with the Opening ceremony happening on July 26th. This curtain raiser fires the starters gun for a sporting and media event like no other, bringing together communities, nations and sports fans from around the world. Meanwhile, according to current available information, Google will look to deprecate cookies potentially around the same time.
According to Teads’ analysis of Tokyo 2020 (which took place in 2021 due to pandemic concerns), the day upon which the 2 billion users that Teads touches consumed the most content about the Olympics was the first Wednesday of the Games.
If that pattern holds true for Paris 2024, and cookies will begin to be deprecated in line with existing timeline, then it becomes more imperative that media professionals start planning now to deliver their Olympics-related campaigns without using third-party cookies.
Looking ahead to 2024, we’ll inevitably see a huge rise in content consumption across a Summer of Sport, including the Men’s Euros and Copa America, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, Tour de France and, of course, the Olympics. Consequently, we can expect media investments to mirror this increase over the summer. Yet this year, clearly, planning, targeting and measurement capabilities could be very different due to Google initiating the phase-out of third-party cookies.
Cookieless Future Explained
Third-party cookies have long been the backbone of digital advertising, enabling businesses to tailor their services and content to user preferences, as well as track, analyse and retarget consumers. This change from Google, though starting with a seemingly small percentage, is the final step (given Safari and Firefox are already cookie-free) and companies must evolve or risk losing significant scale.
With increase in investments expected from brands this year, and as the industry faces a challenge of cookieless tracking and analytics, new cookieless marketing strategies will be more important than ever.
The market is fragmented, and we need to be clear on all the impacts of deprecation. It’s not just going to impact targeting but also things like frequency capping and exposure control, cross-channel reporting, brand and sales lift studies.
It’s vital to know if the technical buying mechanism you have in place will be able to find and deliver impressions effectively in the absence of cookies.
DSPs (demand-side platforms) normally read the signals that result in the right outcome to then find other users with similar signals and bid on them. Some DSPs may be getting their strongest outcomes from cookie-based inventory due to perceived signal fidelity, so they are trained to look for such inventory.
This might explain why some believe that there’s an imbalance in our bidding ecosystem. To remain efficient in the cookieless world, bidders, the actual ‘buying’ bit of any DSP, needs to be good at reading non-cookie-based signals.
Hence, if you bring these two aspects together, there will come a tipping point in 2024 where the increased investment will overlap with the third-party cookie depreciation. This means that advertisers who are not working with suppliers with sophisticated cookieless solutions will be losing out on the immense advertising opportunities that this year will present.
Cookieless Best Practices
Those who are making media investments this summer should be interrogating their vendor partners about their post-cookie deprecation projections to gain an understanding of how expected outcomes will be affected and how the efficacy of any investment will be measured.
As for the future of measurement in the cookieless world, attention metrics can prove very helpful in moving us beyond more simple measures like viewability. The attention conversation is likely to grow even noisier than it was last year. Additionally, panel-based measurement and things like MMM (Media Mix Modelling) may start to resurface as a mainstay of judging how well investments have worked.
The biggest consideration is retargeting. And while there are alternatives to cookies in this space, there are a lot of technical hurdles to make retargeting work at the same scale across all use cases. Advertisers who are hugely performance-focused should be cautious of that.
From a Teads perspective, over the last three years we’ve progressively tested our cookieless solutions, delivering more of our advertising partners’ investments through cookieless advertising techniques. In 2023, we delivered in excess of 70% of our targeting requirements without the use of a cookie. We anticipate that we’ll add another 20% to that across new user attributes and characteristics during H1 2024, and the remaining 10% during H2.
In summary – to maximise any opportunity, start thinking about cookieless analytics, measurement and activation now in preparation for H2. There are definitely plenty of opportunities to execute effective campaigns during big moments like the Euros and the Olympics.
The Teads Data Suite includes contextual targeting, predictive audiences, Media Barometer and the Teads Cookieless Translator. By focusing beyond mere searches and preferences, our approach penetrates the core of user engagement – understanding what content people consume and what truly resonates with them. Ultimately, our goal is to reach people effectively during heightened consumer moments, help promote products and services that meet their needs and interests, as well as conveying powerful messages without being constrained by technology or reliance on cookies.
Connect with us today to begin your journey towards innovative, future-proof data solutions.
You can also hear more on this topic with Jamie Toward, Head of Data, Teads UK on the IAB UK Podcast.