While the tech marketing world awaits the slow, lingering dismantling of the cookie, ID-less advertising could be the next best thing.
So says Pete Emms, Head of Publisher Revenue at Anonymised, who shares why everyone should be looking at ID-less advertising now…
The demise of third-party cookies has been looming for years. However, the reality is more urgent and nuanced than many realise.
Decline of third-party cookies and false promise alternatives
First, let’s clarify that third-party cookies (3PCs) aren’t dead, but they are on life support.
Currently, they cover only around 40% of open web impressions, and with Google’s ongoing privacy changes in Chrome, that share could drop to 10-20% – should we see comparable opt-out rates to Apple’s ‘Ask Not to Track’ feature in Safari.
At that scale, cookies become too scarce to sustain impactful advertising strategies.
Alternative IDs, like emails, fingerprints or IP-based IDs, have emerged as a stopgap measure, promising continuity.
However, these IDs either lack the scale cookies once provided or they lack their accuracy, with probabilistic methods unfit for key marketing tasks such as measurement.
Most importantly, these IDs do not solve the fundamental privacy problems that undermine 3PCs. Nor do they stem the leakage of first-party data from legitimate publishers to fraud-ridden and ‘Made for Advertising’ (MFA) sites that syphon off resources from the advertising ecosystem and undermine ROAS.
Conveniently, commentators ignore the fact that browsers have measures in place to block most alternative identifiers, making their long-term viability questionable.
Without a robust alternative, advertisers face an 80% reduction in bid opportunities, rising CPMs, and diminished access to premium inventory. This could force more budgets away from open web advertising.
The case for ID-less advertising
Most of these problems can be solved using forms of advertising that do not rely on user ID matching process. For example, the syncing of individual identifiers between the browser, the SSP, the exchange and the DSP.
ID-less advertising avoids ID-syncing by moving the data processing closer to the end user (e.g. on the device) or by using real-time, non-ID signals such as geolocation.
ID-less advertising enables targeting, retargeting and measurement across a much greater share of the available inventory, unlocking under monetised inventory at scale.
It is estimated that these approaches would increase addressability on approximately 60% of the open web, impressions that do not have matched IDs and are therefore overlooked by traditional DSPs.
At Anonymised, we process data directly on the device to create cohorts for targeting and measurement, avoiding the need for IDs. This ID-less inventory isn’t valueless.
It offers high-quality audience monetisation pathways, often in brand-safe environments, that do not depend on the presence of user IDs.
It also offers measurement capability using cohort-level data processed in the browser or in trusted execution environments.
Adding this targeting measurement functionality to the traditional, DSP-managed, ID-based models creates resilience for the open web and is critical for the industry’s future.
The opportunity for advertisers
Adopting ID-less solutions offers clear benefits
- For Advertisers: Incremental reach and incremental conversions at competitive CPMs, across privacy-compliant environments like Safari and Firefox.
- For Publishers: Higher bid rates, fill rates and CPMs on previously undersold inventory.
- For Agencies: Enhanced ROI and streamlined delivery of KPIs with great margin potential.
- For Ad Tech: Increased revenue opportunities through the targeting of previously inaccessible, high-margin inventory.
The transition to ID-less advertising won’t happen overnight – it requires collaboration across the ecosystem. But with 60% of the open web already ID-less, the shift is inevitable.
Embracing this future now positions the industry to thrive in a privacy-first world. It’s time to let go of outdated identifiers and embrace scalable, sustainable, ID-less advertising solutions.