Hold on to your advertising hats, because big cookieless changes are coming to the digital ad landscape!

Many of us have experienced being followed across various social media platforms and other websites. And being given persistent personalized reminders to purchase a product after searching for it online.

What’s the reason behind it, ever given it a thought?

We all leave behind traces of data regarding our online activities, including the websites we visit and the searches we make.

Advertisers use this information to deliver personalized ads through a process called online behavioral advertising.

Basically, it’s done through the use of cookies, which are small files that are stored on our device when we visit a website.

Undoubtedly, cookies have helped fuel a multi-billion dollar online advertising industry. According to data, this well-worn digital tool has helped build digital advertising into a highly efficient $350 billion market.

But now as we witness the dawn of third-party cookies, what’s the new alternative targeting option for brands without taking a hit on their ROI?

This blog has all the answers you need. Read it till the end as you won’t want to miss a single detail about Silverpush’s omnichannel hyper-contextual advertising solutions helping brands thrive in the cookieless world.

Why is There a Need to Go Cookie-Less?

“Before cookies, the web was essentially private. After cookies, the web becomes a space capable of extraordinary monitoring,” said Lawrence Lessig 20 years ago.

For a long time now, advertisers have relied on cookies to monitor users across the internet and offer them customized ads based on their browsing behavior.

However, the usefulness of cookies is witnessing a downfall as they are heading toward obsolescence.

As per Google’s recent reports, by the end of 2024, Google’s Chrome browser is anticipated to restrict third-party cookies, which are already blocked on Safari and Firefox.

Google’s Chrome browser dominates the industry with a market share of over 60 percent in Europe and is widely used across multiple regions globally. As a result, we predict that Google’s proposed cookie policy is likely to spell the end of cookie-based advertising.

Advertisers will face a significant challenge as other tracking techniques also face mounting pressure. Notably, Apple’s app-tracking-transparency (ATT) framework already requires app providers to obtain explicit user consent before tracking them via device identifiers in the mobile app space.

Preliminary data suggests that only around 46% of consumers are willing to be tracked, and this percentage may be even lower in countries where privacy is a major concern for users.

The recent update in Apple’s policies means that app providers will face limitations in tracking users through device identifiers within the Apple ecosystem. Meaning, most users will not be trackable, which could have implications for targeted advertising and user profiling.

It’s worth noting that both Google and Apple have publicly stated that they will not support any attempts to create workarounds, such as probabilistic fingerprinting, to enable user-level profiling within their ecosystems.

Advertisers Need to Look Out for Themselves

It’s predicted that the elimination of third-party cookies and device identifiers will likely have a negative impact on advertising effectiveness and ultimately on the ROI for advertisers in the short term.

This will pose a significant challenge for brand marketers in sectors that are not closely tied to customer transactions, such as consumer packaged goods, automotive, and pharmaceuticals.

Despite the challenges, advertisers have several opportunities to strike a balance between precise targeting and accurate impact measurement while respecting consumer privacy.

Broadly speaking, implementing strategies that prioritize transparency and provide value to users in exchange for their data will most likely lead to success.

Many users are comfortable with personalized advertising as long as they are fully informed about the underlying mechanisms and not misled in any way. This approach can also help build consumer trust in the brand, which is a valuable outcome.

Upgrade your Advertising with Silverpush’s Hyper Contextual Cookieless Solutions

With the end of third-party cookies, advertisers need to shift to new solutions to engage with users in a privacy-safe and effective way.

Silverpush’s Mirrors offers contextual targeting solutions that deliver personalized ads to audiences without relying on their personal data. This ensures brand safety and relevance to the brand, even in a cookie-less environment.

Leverage the AI-powered solution of Mirrors by Silverpush to reach your relevant audience at the right time and place while respecting user privacy. Our platform guarantees complete brand safety and suitability on popular channels such as YouTube, OpenWeb, and CTV.

To learn more about how Silverpush can help you prepare for the cookieless world, simply fill out our form, and we’ll guide you toward successful advertising in a cookieless future.

With the digital advertising industry rapidly evolving, it’s important to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. 

Contextual advertising, which has been a game-changer for brands to maximize their ROI, has helped them reach their target audience in a more relevant and personalized way. 

But, with the advent of newer technologies, even this life savior of brands after the apocalypse of third-party cookies requires an upgrade. 

Generative AI, which has taken the world by storm has revolutionized work and creativity, offering numerous benefits and opportunities. 

While many industries have already incorporated Generative AI into their business, contextual advertising is close and is also exploring how this technology can benefit them.

How will Generative AI Pave the Way for Contextual Advertising? 

Generative AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to transform the way advertisers reach their target audiences. 

Unlike traditional AI models, which rely on historical data, Generative AI can create new and unique data sets, enabling advertisers to expand their reach to audiences that were previously out of reach using traditional methods. 

This technology can identify patterns and correlations between seemingly unrelated data points, resulting in a more personalized and relevant advertising experience for users. 

With the ability to generate new data sets and identify new audience segments, Generative AI is opening up new possibilities for advertisers to reach their target audiences with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Silverpush X Generative AI: Changing the Advertising Game for Brands

In an age where privacy concerns are at an all-time high, relying on third-party cookies to reach relevant audiences has become increasingly challenging.

Silverpush, which is a hyper-contextual advertising company has incorporated Generative AI into its contextual AI platform- Mirrors to provide brands with an effective solution to target without the use of cookies.

The launch of a contextual planning tool powered by Generative AI represents a significant advancement in the capabilities of Silverpush’s flagship product, Mirrors. 

By incorporating next-generation AI capabilities, the tool further enhances Mirrors’ contextual offering, addressing the challenges of cookieless targeting and revolutionizing the digital advertising space.

How will it Benefit Advertisers?

1. This tool will enable advertisers to identify contextually relevant audiences without relying on third-party cookies.

2. The AI-powered contextual platform, Mirrors, will give access to a wide range of contextual signals that can be used to transform brands’ ad targeting strategies. 

3. Mirrors, powered by Generative AI, allow advertisers to gain insights into user behavior and preferences, leading to more precise targeting and a better user experience.

4. Generative AI can also solve the problem of users getting tired of seeing the same ad too many times (ad fatigue) and being shown too many ads (frequency capping), which can make them less likely to engage with the ads.  

5. By creating unique data sets and identifying new audience segments, advertisers can ensure that their ads are reaching the right users at the right time, without overwhelming them with too many ads.

Final Words

The integration of Generative AI into Silverpush’s contextual AI stack marks a significant advancement in the field of digital advertising. With this technology, advertisers can surpass the restrictions of traditional targeting methods and provide users with more personalized, relevant, and effective ad experiences. But, there’s more to it than you think. Stay tuned for our next blog on Gen AI, where we dive deeper into the potential of this groundbreaking technology and reveal some major possibilities for advertisers. 

With 60% of global web traffic going cookieless by 2023. Advertisers are still not clear on how to navigate the landscape in the cookieless future. Silverpush’s AI solutions will help fill this gap by providing alternative targeting methods to advertisers & publishers. 

Going back to 1992, the year when Netscape made a significant impact in digital history by inventing cookies, allowing websites to save user information and preferences.

This marked a turning point for the digital advertising industry which experienced a revolution as cookies soon became the lifeblood of the online ecosystem. The digital advertising market is currently worth $681.39 billion, and cookies play a major role in its rapid expansion.

As we move forward to 2023, third-party cookies have become a menace for advertisers and publishers who are now looking for alternatives to reach their audience with cookieless advertising solutions.

What Does the Removal of Third-Party Cookies Mean for Advertisers and Publishers?

Today, 86% of US marketers rely on third-party cookies to gain information about user behavior. The impending elimination of third-party cookies presents a major challenge for advertisers to effectively track user behavior and deliver personalized ads. 

This change has the potential to negatively impact the digital advertising industry, reducing its efficacy. Publishers will also face difficulties in monetizing their websites, potentially leading to a reduction in the quality of online content as they explore alternative revenue streams like subscriptions or paywalls. 

Despite the growing privacy concerns of consumers, personalization remains a priority for them.  Marketers must find new solutions to provide personalized experiences without relying solely on third-party cookies to avoid a decrease in ad revenue. 

As a marketer, it’s crucial to stay informed and explore new solutions to navigate this shift successfully. This blog will provide answers to your questions on how to adapt to this change.

What Does Cookieless Future Mean?

The cookieless future or cookieless world refers to the ban on third-party cookies. The decision to ban third-party cookies was initiated by Safari and Firefox and later adopted by Google. 

The phase-out of third-party cookies by Google, originally scheduled for 2022, was postponed to 2023 and has now been further delayed to the second half of 2024. Take a look at the timeline of third-party cookie depreciation and how Google has again pushed back its deadline, this time to 2024.  

This shift in the digital landscape is driven by privacy concerns and will have a significant impact on advertisers and marketers who rely on cookies to gather information about their target audience.

In the cookieless future, advertisers will need to find third-party cookie alternatives for personalization and targeting, such as through first-party data and the use of privacy-focused advertising methods like contextual advertising. 

They should also consider investing in the development of new data sources and technologies and prioritize transparency and user privacy. 

To prepare for this change, advertisers and marketers should stay informed about industry developments and new regulations in privacy and data usage.

What Will Happen in a Cookieless World?

An immediate impact of a future without cookies will be seen in the size of third-party audiences, causing a decrease in their viability for media buying. 

As a result, marketers will face lower conversion rates and ineffective targeting. 

To counteract this impact, marketers must devise innovative audience analysis techniques and utilize alternative marketing methods such as email marketing.

In the wake of phasing out third-party cookies, businesses and marketers need to shift to advertising industry’s next big step – contextual targeting as much as possible. 

Contextual targeting strategies could prove crucial to successfully personalize experiences throughout the customer journey while ensuring data security and relevant, targeted advertising opportunities.

Also read: https://www.silverpush.co/news/what-does-life-after-third-party-cookies-look-like/

How Can Marketers Prepare for a Cookieless Future?

As the use of third-party cookies faces imminent extinction, the advertising industry has been actively searching for alternative solutions. Despite the availability of various options, each comes with its own limitations. Here are some of the top substitutes for third-party data to drive your digital marketing efforts:

1. First-Party Data

This targeting method also uses cookies, enabling similar targeting capabilities. However, first-party data strategies only track a consumer’s activity within the website that has implemented them. 

For instance, if a consumer returns to Pepperfry.com, the site will recall the furniture they previously viewed, but that furniture won’t follow that person to other sites.

This approach allows marketers to target ads to consumers effectively on their own websites without tracking them beyond their platforms. While some customers may appreciate the personalization, collecting first-party data may still feel intrusive to those who are simply browsing and don’t want to feel followed.

‍2. PII-Based Identifiers

Using personal identification information such as email addresses or phone numbers, marketers can track users across different devices. This is in contrast to cookies, which do not typically transfer between desktop and mobile. With PII-based identifiers, a site can recognize when a previous user has returned by recognizing an ID generated from a login or other site action. This ID does not link to any personally identifiable information, but instead to the user’s online behavior.

‍3. Browser Fingerprinting

This technique identifies a device and user by assessing various attributes of a device through the browser. This includes browser type, operating system, active plugins, timezone, language, screen resolution, and settings. While browser fingerprinting can accurately identify the same user across interactions, it is not 100% certain.

4. Google Privacy Sandbox

Google Privacy Sandbox, which is still in its early development stages, aims to provide advertisers with anonymized information through the use of five application programming interfaces (API) in Chrome’s browser instead of cookies. This will limit the amount of information available to marketers while allowing individual users to remain anonymous.

‍5. Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is the only option that does not involve any surveillance. Instead of focusing on consumer identity, contextual advertising displays advertisements next to content that is relevant to the ads. 

Which one would you like better? Viewing an ad for sports shoes while reading an article about Jeff Bezos (because a few days back you were scrolling through the internet searching for gym shoes) or, coming across an ad for sports shoes while reading an article on fitness.

Definitely, the latter! Because it is relevant to the content they are currently engaged with.

By targeting interests rather than individuals, contextual advertising is a smart option for advertisers to target consumers in the imminent cookieless future.

Ad tech companies like Silverpush are at the forefront of the shift towards a more privacy-focused and cookie-free future, thanks to advancements in contextual technologies.

Silverpush Will Help You Thrive in Cookieless World

Silverpush saw the flaws of third-party cookies years ago. Since, they’re not people-based, not transparent, and can’t identify people over time they never needed it to help their clients reach their relevant audience. 

Silverpush, a contextual advertising company has always known that the key to reaching the relevant audience is through contextual targeting.  

That’s why we built our AI-powered solution – Mirrors in 2012. Initially, we offered our contextual advertising solutions only on YouTube. Now we have expanded our technology to OpenWeb, Meta, and CTV. 

Mirrors privacy-safe and contextual targeting solutions are a rescuer in the cookieless world. Personalized ads are delivered to the audience with zero dependencies on their data. Most importantly, the placement of ads is done in a completely brand-safe environment with relevance to a particular brand.

The urgency of the climate crisis is increasing, and the media industry is no exception. While some professionals are working to reduce their direct operational emissions, there is an urgent need for common standards to be set for indirect emissions that come from digital advertising.

The digital advertising industry is becoming increasingly aware of the significant carbon footprint associated with the delivery of billions of digital ad impressions daily. Although a few brands, agencies, and ad tech companies have pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030 or sooner, the question remains: What is needed to encourage the majority of the industry to adopt similar goals?

Carbon Footprints Laid by Digital Ads

Although it is often thought of as more environmentally friendly, digital advertising still has a significant impact on the environment. In fact, it is responsible for about 2-4% of global carbon emissions, which is comparable to the aviation industry.

To give context, it is essential to note that serving one million ad impressions generates one metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions produced by (Source: venturebeat.com).

1. One passenger on a round-trip flight between Boston to London.

2. Charging over 121,000 smartphones to full battery power.

3. The carbon in 2.4 million plastic straws.

The operation of servers for digital advertising and the internet results in adverse environmental effects such as heat, noise, and pollution throughout the entire programmatic supply chain. This accumulative impact raises concerns for advertisers.

Tracking Carbon Emissions through Digital Ads

The digital advertising industry has been making progress in reducing its carbon emissions, following the Paris Agreement in 2016 which was signed by 200 countries with the goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions. In 2020, the UK Advertising Association launched Ad Net Zero, recognizing the industry’s need to become more sustainable. Many companies such as WPP, Havas, Dentsu, Disney, Unilever, and Dell have committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2030 or later.

Achieving aggressive carbon-reducing goals in the ad tech industry requires setting standards for measuring and reporting carbon emissions. Measuring carbon emissions allows an organization to determine its current level of CO2 waste and identify the primary sources of emissions. Similar to how companies report their financial performance, reporting on carbon emissions allows advertisers and brands to be transparent and accountable in their efforts to reach net zero carbon emissions.

Setting Industry Standards to Calculate Carbon Emissions

Measuring carbon emissions can be complex, but understanding the different components that contribute to a company’s carbon footprint can simplify the process. These components are typically broken down into three categories: Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions.

Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from sources that the company owns or controls, such as fuel combustion in boilers or vehicles. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, heat, or steam. Scope 3 emissions are other indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of the company, such as the emissions from the extraction of raw materials or the disposal of waste. which typically make up more than 90% of a company’s total carbon emissions.

For advertisers to accurately measure their carbon emissions, it is important to understand the contributions of their DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, publisher partners, and other vendors to their Scope 3 emissions. By assessing the impact of these vendors, advertisers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their overall carbon footprint.

How do Silverpush’s Cookieless Solutions Neutralize Carbon Emissions?

One of the many reasons for high carbon emissions in digital advertising is audience targeting. Standard targeting methods may deliver high impressions, however, they generate wasted impressions due to the random placement of ads and the targeting of the wrong audience.

Silverpush offers precise and detailed targeting options that identify the most qualified audiences, which needlessly reduces pointless impressions and drastically reduces carbon impressions. By delivering relevant ads through contextual targeting, advertising campaigns become more efficient and fewer ads are displayed to users. This results in a reduction in energy consumption of servers and devices used to deliver ads, ultimately reducing CO2eqPM emissions.

Conclusion

Advertisers can reduce their environmental impact by implementing sustainable practices such as using renewable energy, measuring and reporting their carbon emissions, and offsetting their emissions through carbon credits or other means. They can also consider using more efficient technologies, such as programmatic advertising, that target specific audiences and reduce the number of ads delivered, ultimately reducing energy consumption.

Whether or not the ad tech industry will become carbon neutral by 2025 is uncertain and it would depend on the level of commitment from the industry players and the government to take the necessary steps to reduce carbon emissions. It would also require a concerted effort from all stakeholders, including advertisers, agencies, and technology providers, to adopt sustainable practices and invest in new technologies to lower their carbon footprint.

What do you think? Will Ad Industry become carbon neutral by 2025? Let us know your thoughts!