With Its Frequency Tool, The Financial Times Fine-Tunes Ad Exposure

With the planned deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome coming next year, The Financial Times is using a solution designed to help marketers replace—and potentially improve upon—one of the cookies’ most vital functions: ad frequency capping. And early indications of its success are encouraging.

Introduced earlier this year, the publisher’s frequency optimization tool aims to give advertisers a cookieless means of measuring and fine-tuning ad exposure across The Financial Times’ ecosystem, said media director Lucy Marchington.

The technology, which lets the publisher more precisely control the number of times a user is exposed to an ad campaign, can improve brand recall and lift—metrics used to measure the performance of a brand marketing campaign. 

“We want this to be a solution available to our advertising clients to help navigate the challenges they’re facing with the depreciation of third-party cookies,” Marchington said. “Obviously being part of the commercial department, we do need to consider revenue. But this is much more of a long-term play for us.”

So far, the publisher has completed nine campaigns in which advertisers have used frequency optimization as their key performance indicator, according to Marchington. It has yet to generate incremental revenue, but the hope is that it will spur repeat business by improving the efficacy of its campaigns.

More broadly, the publisher said digital advertising revenues grew 37% in 2022 compared with the previous year, and it has had stronger-than-predicted demand for advertising so far in 2023. It declined to share specific figures.

The frequency solution is only available to campaigns over £100,000, and it comes as the digital advertising industry scrambles to prepare for the looming disappearance of third-party cookies, which many marketers use to measure and enforce frequency caps. 

Logged-in users allow cookieless measurement

The technology that powers frequency optimization relies on The Financial Times’ large database of authenticated readers, who must log in to access its content. The publisher has a paying readership of around 1.3 million, more than 1 million of which are digital.

When readers provide the publisher with their email address, it assigns them a unique first-party ID, which it links to its data management platform, according to Joshua Ford, the commercial innovation manager at The Financial Times. 

This connection lets the publisher recognize its readers, segment them by frequency exposure and tailor the ads they encounter as they move between its desktop, mobile and app platforms. For publishers without a large database of authenticated readers, the solution could be challenging to replicate, said Alex Yip, the senior solutions architect at the measurement firm AppsFlyer.

It works in concert with other advertising technology to not only serve relevant ads to readers based on their past consumption but to ensure they encounter the ads the optimal number of times to achieve peak recall, according to Ford.

Ad frequency sweet spot

In an analysis of its own brand surveys, the publisher found a strong correlation between readers who exhibited a lift in brand recall and those who had been exposed to an ad between five and ten times in a week.

To reach that sweet spot, frequency optimization employs two primary, counterbalancing functions. 

The technology can cap the frequency of a campaign, preventing wasteful overexposure, but it can also set frequency floors, helping ensure that a reader encounters a campaign enough times to be memorable.

While many publishers and platforms offer frequency capping, few have provided tools for effective, cookieless flooring, said Ana Milicevic, the principal and co-founder of Sparrow Advisors.

In particular, the publisher has sought to nudge more of its readers from the 1-to-2 exposure range into the highly performant 5-to-10 exposure range. Since launching the product this year, The Financial Times has increased its number of 5-to-10 exposures by 80%, according to Marchington.

The tool works across all its digital environments, meaning advertisers can use frequency optimization as their preferred KPI on campaigns, including digital display, homepage sponsorship and partner content. 

Still, it only works within The Financial Times’ ecosystem, meaning it does not fully replace the functionality offered by the third-party cookie, which allows for cross-domain capping, according to Yip.

“As a brand, if your campaign effort is across multiple publishers, how can you accurately manage the proper number of impressions for a user across all different sites?” Yip said. “You may exceed the sweet spot and potentially waste impressions.”

Nonetheless, the solution provides The Financial Times with a potential edge—just the kind of advantage that can help the company win competitive budgets, according to Milicevic.

“This adds another input that enables a more intelligent matching between advertiser and reader,” Milicevic said. “Ideally, that means the client gets more value for its buy, and the reader sees more relevant advertising.”