Connatix’s Jenn Chen on the Cookieless Future: “Start testing solutions now”

Connatix President and CRO, Jenn Chen, joins ExchangeWire for a discussion around the cookieless future, how both advertisers and publishers are preparing, and how both can create stable revenue streams.

As cookie deprecation on Chrome inches closer, are there many advertisers and publishers who are still failing to get a suitable future-proof strategy in place?

With yet another delay in third-party cookie deprecation this year, some of the industry believes we can afford to delay preparation, however, at Connatix we believe in preparing for the cookieleess future now. It’s vital that both publishers and advertisers maintain 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. 

Through Connatix’s Data Intelligence Suite, launched this week, advertisers can leverage a collection of innovative targeting solutions tailored to their goals, enabling them to diversify their strategies and test and compare solutions to determine what works best for their business in advance of the cookieless future. Advertisers and publishers should start testing solutions now, while it’s easy to see the impact through A/B testing using existing measurement methodologies and partnerships.

How do the positions of advertisers and publishers compare when it comes to the cookieless future? 

According to a recent report by WARC, only half (51%) of marketers are prepared for the depreciation of third-party cookies. Some advertisers are skeptical of Google’s deadlines, and it's hard for them to wrap their heads around investing and preparing for something that seems far off in the distance. However, the entire industry is starting to face the reality that cookie deprecation is inevitable regardless of the timeline, and because of that more advertisers are starting to test solutions to future-proof their strategies. 

For publishers, between the alphabet soup of alternative IDs, addressability concerns and data solutions, it’s no surprise that they are proactively bulking up on their approaches to data in light of cookie deprecation. However, scale and privacy are what they should be working towards, so it’s important to build a data culture that sets them up for success. Bringing in multiple opted-in data sources and allowing them to work together with a mix of deterministic and probabilistic data, and storing that data together, can maximise audience match rates while prioritising user privacy.