The amount of inefficiency in the supply path does cause problems for a publisher to figure [out] how this works.
Kanishk Prasad, director of product management, The Trade Desk
Another progress point is that 70% of brands working with data platform LiveRamp buy on RampID or with direct publisher integrations, with no reliance on third-party cookies, said Travis Clinger, LiveRamp’s svp of activations and addressability.
While advertisers aren’t consistently testing alternative IDs themselves, they want to make sure their ad-tech partners are prepared for cookie deprecation. Two-thirds of the requests for information received by SSP OpenX from agencies in North America include questions about cookie deprecation and future-proofing, compared to less than half of the RFIs the previous year, according to OpenX svp of product Mike Chowla.
While agencies have asked about OpenX’s plans for cookie deprecation in the past, the level of granularity this year is more intense than years prior, Chowla added.
For example, agencies are asking for signal deprecation assessments by brand and how the company works with proposals like Fledge. Agencies are also more frequently asking what identifiers and signals their platform supports and how these alternative identifiers perform on CPMs, CPAs, reach and measurement, Chowla said.
Challenges in measuring the impact of alternative IDs
The industry is looking to understand the efficacy of various alternative identifiers, but measurement is elusive.
Publishers don’t often get visibility over why DSPs choose to bid on their inventory, making it hard to ascertain if the presence of an alternative identifier factored into the buyer’s decision, especially given the limited scale of these solutions.
“I don’t think there is enough spend that [impacts] are going to stand up and be really obvious unless you have a rigorous methodology to see it,” said Mike O’Sullivan, co-founder of currency platform Sincera. “There is usage, but I also agree there isn’t enough usage to really make it obvious the benefits it’s driving.”
Isolating impacts on the sell side is further complicated by the convoluted ad-tech supply chain, said The Trade Desk’s Prasad.
“The amount of inefficiency in the supply path … from a publisher to a buyer does cause problems for a publisher to figure [out] how did this work,” he said.
However, Prasad noted that buyers could fairly easily isolate the effects of an alternative ID versus the impact of cookies during the attribution process.