• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 25, 2022

With 40% of global traffic not reachable through third-party cookies in Safari, Firefox, and Edge, it has become difficult for advertisers to run campaign strategies in these browsers.

IBM partnered with identity provider ID5, and digital ad platform MediaMath to execute a campaign in the U.S. across desktop, Android, and Apple iOS devices. It relied on MediaMath’s demand side platform (DSP) technology and ID5’s ID to recognize business to business (B2B) Safari users to retarget them.

The campaign took place in the second quarter of 2022, targeting for IBM business solutions, with enterprise-level solutions that were marketed to CTOs or CIOs.

“In Europe, around GDPR, consumers need to opt in, but most other places in the world, consumers need to opt out,” says Joseph Quaglia, vice president of sales and business development at ID5, a five-year-old company. “Consent management platforms give users the ability to make those determinations.”

ID5’s technology runs on more than 120,000 domains globally. The direct publisher integrations let ID5 gain consent at the time the site visitor loads the publisher’s website on their device. Consent by the site visitor lets ID5 assign an ID to the users and push the ID back into the publisher’s ad technology, so they use it in their programmatic ad business.  

Quaglia said IBM was trying to reach B2B tech-vertical consumers. These are typically Apple users. Those using Safari skew a higher net worth and tend to be more technically savvy.

"It is a very competitive and difficult audience to run strategies like this one," Quaglia said, but it allowed IBM to find these users more easily."

IBM’s test used the ID5 signal rather than cookies. The campaign enabled IBM to create opt-in audiences to reach and retarget 1.4 million B2B users in Safari. The campaign benefited from more competitive CPMs while honoring the users’ privacy choices.

The company maximized the campaign budget as the average CPM was 21% lower across Apple iOS users compared to the average CPM across Android devices.

Creatives and targeting are managed through MediaMath, which helped to facilitate the test. “IBM’s test with ID5 is indicative of what other clients are doing,” says Jared Lansky, senior vice president of partnerships at MediaMath. “Ultimately, a portfolio approach will be needed. There won’t be one solution that solves everything to provide the same type of addressability.”

CPMs in cookieless browsers cost about 50% lower than in Chrome, given that buyers are not willing to invest much in unaddressable cookieless traffic. At the same time, publishers see their average Safari or Firefox CPM increase. Traffic becomes addressable and more attractive to advertisers.