Beyond Cookies: A Webinar Panel Recap

The upcoming deprecation of tracking cookies will, obviously, dramatically affect the advertising industry. On Tuesday, we at RTB House hosted a webinar where I presented on what RTB House’s plans were moving towards the cookieless world, and to more generally give some info on this technical subject in a more understandable format. 

We also had a great panel discussion afterwards, where myself and Dan Bishop, Senior Vice President, Global Mobile Strategy & Digital Marketing at Citi, answered some audience questions about cookie deprecation and RTB House’s role in this ecosystem. The panel was moderated by Ronan Shields, Programmatic Editor at AdWeek. 

In this recap today, I’d like to go over some of Dan and my answers to those questions. If you’re in the ad industry, or if you’re a marketer who currently relies on cookies, check it out! 

How will cookie changes affect the industry at large? 

As Google allows vendors into their 360 stack, they will create a giant front-door into their tech. This has real opportunity to foster competition among vendors, leading to new technologies, an increase in visibility, and shut down backdoor, non-compliant solutions. At RTB House, we see this as an opportunity to improve our targeting campaigns while also increasing user privacy.

Dan’s response to this question was that brands have to ensure that there are people on board who have the right experience to adapt to these changes. As this is a journey and a process of changing this technology, it’s crucial that marketers previously reliant on cookies become familiar with the ins and outs of this tech. Brands who don’t adapt, or adapt too slowly, may be challenged by this change. 

What have the biggest challenges and roadblocks been so far?

In my opinion, the biggest challenge has been in communicating how FLoC, FLEDGE, and similar technologies will work & what they will do. Early communications were very technical and didn’t target marketers - but the more marketers understand how these work, the more buy-in there will be from brands. As this tech is replacing an entire ecosystem, it is critical to inform everyone, from both sides of buying and selling, from CTOs to junior marketers, how it will fit together. Using technical language and a variety of acronyms can hurt the overall system by simply decreasing how many people understand it. 

Will we see legal regulation around this? How will that play out?

Regulation on how this works on the federal level will be critical. If each state legislates differently on this subject, it will be incredibly challenging for advertisers to use this model as the ecosystem would be so complex. Instead, federal legislation will simplify this model and allow it to thrive at scale. 

Calling the FLoC 95% efficacy statistic into question - how realistic is that number?

I can’t speak to any of our competitors’ testing, only our own. What we found when comparing the future-state with cohorts to our current programmatic ad-state was that the future-state had a click-through rate at 94.5% of what’s currently live. We focused specifically on CTR, as the end-goal of this tech is to provide brands with qualified traffic through digital advertising. 

What are your estimates for a rough timeline of how this will play out?

From my perspective, If you’re a brand, make sure you’re ready for this to go live on January 1. While it’s likely that the rollout will not be that rapid, it’s always best to prepare for the worst. However, I believe that the more likely outcome is that FLoC and FLEDGE will be soft-launched in Q1, tested, iterated, and improved in Q2 & Q3, and be fully implemented by the winter peak months. 

Per Dan: Google, Apple - they’re human. This is a complex problem, and hasn’t been figured out by anyone. In terms of timeline, the best case - and most likely scenario - is what Gary described, as Google problem-solves during the beginning and middle of 2022. 

I hope this brief overview of our panel has been informative. Stay tuned for more information on this upcoming change from RTB House!