If a brand with the same campaign parameters lowered its frequency cap, it would waste more money, according to Adform’s calculations.

For example, with a frequency cap of six, that campaign would waste $243,000, or more than 24% of the budget. And with a frequency cap of five, that campaign would waste $269,000 or at least 26% of their budget. These figures only apply to open exchange campaigns.

Trying to value cookieless inventory

Over the last 18 months, greater adoption of alt IDs is helping buyers understand how to value cookieless traffic, said Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5.

Still, the adoption process can take the form of a chicken-and-egg problem—if DSPs don’t make particular alternative IDs available for buyers, the sell side will see little value in monetizing a site with that ID. And if SSPs don’t use the alternative IDs to monetize supply, there will be nothing for buyers to bid on.

“That’s the difficulty of our business. We need to convince everyone to integrate at the same time,” Roche said. “It’s slow because it’s super critical. I don’t think that anybody doubts [the] reality,” of needing a cookie replacement solution. “It’s just an alignment of interest.”

Email authentication limits inventory

In some cases, CPMs can be higher in cookieless environments than with cookies, said Andrew Eifler, chief product officer at SSP TripleLift.

But even if SSPs monetized more cookieless inventory, supply would still be minimal because some alternative IDs rely on emails, which few users give to publishers.

“There have been some buyers that have been sold on a story that you can use email-based IDs to run your marketing campaign,” Eifler said. “There is not enough reach in terms of audience because there’s too much demand crammed into not enough supply.”