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While cookie deprecation threatens to upend the digital advertising economy next year, ad buyers are still taking a relaxed approach to test audience targeting alternatives.
During 2023 and late 2022, ad buyers’ efforts to test alternative IDs have lacked momentum, six ad-tech and publisher sources told Adweek.
“From the sell side perspective, nobody seems to be actually buying on these unique user IDs,” said a publisher ad-tech source, who wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “There is a lot of talk of setting this up. The buy-side doesn’t seem to be buying on it.”
Supply-side platform Magnite has seen few buyers ask to set up private marketplace deals using alternative IDs in the past few months, compared to somewhat regular asks earlier in 2022 and in 2021, according to Garrett McGrath, Magnite’s svp of product management.
“The lion-share of web transactions happen on Chrome and third-party cookies are still there,” McGrath said.
Demand-side platform RTB House was running a few large-scale campaigns using alternative identifiers prior to Black Friday in 2022, which paused and weren’t relaunched. This was mainly due to economic headwinds, said Mateusz Ruminski, private advertising ecosystem go-to-market lead at RTB House, which still has run smaller campaigns with alternative IDs.
“We see that advertisers are more willing to rely on trusted and well-known technologies in these difficult times,” Ruminski said.
Agency interest in future-proofing has increased
Sources attributed the buy-side’s decreased emphasis on testing alternative IDs on a number of factors, such as economic headwinds, Google’s July 2022 announcement delaying the cookie deprecation deadline by a year, challenges isolating alternative IDs results, plus the existence of cookies still swirling in the bidstream.
Testing has also lagged on Google Privacy Sandbox paradigm Fledge, a different process to cookies, though not an alternative identifier.
Some sources contested that there has been a slowdown in testing in recent months, though acknowledged there is still not enough evidence to know the identity landscape of the future.
The Trade Desk’s UID2 team is busier than ever, with a large percentage of its advertisers using UID2, the DSP’s cookie alternative solution, according to The Trade Desk’s director of product management Kanishk Prasad.