Q+A with Jenn Chen and Jesse Fisher: Road to Interoperability

Google has been grappling with feedback from all sides of the industry, specifically pushback from The IAB Tech Lab, and U.K. regulatory bodies like the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The CMA in particular worried that Google's Privacy Sandbox might unfairly favor Google's own advertising products, potentially solidifying their ad dominance like an oversized cookie in the jar. 

So as we now await a new 2025 deadline pending the thumbs-up from the CMA and ICO, that leaves us all wondering in the meantime, what’s next? We sat down with our President and CRO Jenn Chen, alongside our Head of Advertising Products, Jesse Fisher to find out exactly that.

Q: Do you think this is the final delay from Google in the third-party cookie deprecation timeline? 

A: Jenn Chen, President and CRO 

I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on Google’s track record, I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see another delay in the timeline. Regardless of third-party cookie deprecation, the road to interoperability treks on. My greatest piece of advice is to encourage the industry to maintain its momentum in preparation—it is a moment in time where we have both cookied and non-cookied (contextual, predictive, cohort, etc) solutions to test and learn from. We still have attribution based on cookies that can be a benchmark for non-cookied targeting. There is no better A/B testing condition than now.

Q: What is interoperability, and why should it be a priority?

A: Jenn 

As an industry, interoperability, scale, and privacy-first solutions should be what we are working towards, regardless of Google’s delays. It’s important to think about the bigger picture. Interoperability should be a priority for our industry because it can help unlock reach, help monitor ad frequency, and create a more holistic measurement framework to attribute success across campaigns. Striving for interoperability will allow us to achieve a more unified ecosystem and not become dependent on future partners who will force us to accept self-graded homework.

Q: How can publishers and advertisers work towards interoperability in our ecosystem?

A: Jesse Fisher, Head of Advertising Products

To avoid fragmentation, the industry needs to work together to leverage alternative IDs and other more privacy-focused solutions like contextual alongside new signals (e.g., audience, performance).

When it comes to publishers that rely solely on deterministic IDs, which use personally identifiable information like email logins to link multiple devices to a single user, they may struggle to achieve scale. While single sign-on solutions can help authenticate users across multiple platforms, they don't provide a complete picture. The most effective approach to achieving interoperability goals involves leveraging multiple data sources, combining deterministic and probabilistic data, and storing this data together to maximize audience match rates. Integrating various IDs and utilizing internal mapping systems or third-party partners can effectively tie different identifiers to the same user, enhancing user understanding and targeting accuracy across platforms. The market is full of data partners and solutions to help manage identity data in a cookieless world. These tools – like ID5, Panorama ID, UID2.0, and RampID, can improve monetization while still being privacy-conscious as these IDs still operate under the consent that the consumer provides.As newer identity solutions come across the market and continue to evolve, understanding their intricacies is vital, that’s why the IAB Tech Lab is currently working on a proposal that will help formalize how all identifiers are sent in bid requests, so that they are sent in the appropriate fields. The IAB Tech Lab is committed to fostering innovation and collaboration within the digital advertising landscape, and the need for regulation will be vital as we explore new cookie-less solutions.

Advertisers who have already started testing alternative identifiers are ahead in the game. This delay presents a valuable opportunity window to keep building a diverse strategy that leverages both contextual data and alternative identifier data to pave the way for success once the cookie countdown is over.

Q. Why do you think building a diverse strategy that leverages both contextual and alternative identifiers is the key to success?

A: Jesse

In addition to testing identity solutions, another part of your strategy should involve testing contextual targeting solutions to maximize both scale and reach. 

For advertisers and publishers, maybe you use your first-party data to build a contextual audience in a cookieless and ID-free way, predicting the types of content your audience may want to see based on existing information in your data set. There are also cookieless solutions available to start leveraging now, like Connatix’s contextual targeting solution Deep Contextual. As we move forward it will be important to target using both contextual signals and supported alternative IDs, to achieve incremental reach and scale in cookieless environments. 

Advertisers and publishers should seize this opportunity while we still have time to test solutions and see the impact through A/B testing to help guide the new proxies and performance replacements when (not if) the cookie is actually gone.

Q: How is Connatix here to help?

A: Jenn 

Connatix is leveraging this valuable time window by working directly with both publishers and identity providers to enrich and better qualify bid requests with alternative identifiers that can be matched on the buy-side for targeting, frequency capping and measurement. Connatix will continue to help advertisers and publishers future-proof their strategies, but we are also committed to doing so in privacy-safe ways by keeping the user in mind, only leveraging user-level data when we have consent to do so, and making use of Connatix’s proprietary contextual signals in a smart way. These durable identifiers will play an integral role in future-proofing strategies, and we are excited to unveil more soon!