• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 2, 2023

Paul Bell, President at 33Across, wants marketers to understand, if they don’t already, that expanding addressability to cookieless browsers is a positive move for programmatic supply-and-demand partners because it allows advertisers to target new audiences that were previously ignored, while driving a fair price for this inventory for publishers from the increase in bid activity.

33Across’ Lexicon platform drives the programmatic ecosystem to normalize traffic for partners like Underdog Media, Bell said. On Wednesday 33Across, an identity solution and platform designed for the open web, announced the outcome of its strategic partnership with Underdog Media, an ad monetization company serving 100% viewable ad units.

By leveraging 33Across’ Lexicon, Underdog Media successfully increased revenue, bid rates, and traffic. Within one week of implementation, cookie alternative revenue from unaddressable traffic skyrocketed by 50%, accompanied by a 30% raise in bid rates. 

After two weeks, Underdog Media experienced a 194% surge in revenue from unaddressable traffic, with approximately 82% of this revenue originating from Safari traffic. And bid win rates, the percentage of programmatic impressions won in a programmatic ad buy, experienced an increase of 140% for Lexicon-enabled traffic, surpassing the performance of third-party cookies. 

Bell said there wasn’t anything unusual with the technical setup to achieve these results. Underdog Media simply downloaded the 33Across ID Module on Prebid that is supported by nearly all of the major supply side platforms (SSPs).  The core value of Lexicon and any good ID solution is to make a publisher’s supply outside of third-party cookies addressable to demand, demand side platforms and advertisers.  

“It’s worth noting that the real definition of addressability for demand is not just if there is an ID in the bid request but that the ID or identifiers being passed actually mean something to the DSP/bidder,” he said. “Once the bid request becomes a ‘known’ user, Underdog Media’s high-impact creative and publisher domains provide the remaining ingredients to drive cookie-like demand behavior.”

Today, more than half the open web works without third-party cookies. A publisher’s unaddressable supply is often completely ignored by demand or sold at a severe discount.

The Lexicon and Underdog partnership demonstrates publishers do not need to sacrifice half of their traffic nor does a DSP need to focus all their efforts on half the internet.

“The industry is just months away from when Google will start to remove third-party cookies, so an uncomplicated addressable solution couldn’t be any more relevant,” he said.
The biggest challenge, Bell said, is making a publisher’s traffic addressable, because it unlocks a major hurdle for supply and demand to function outside of third-party cookies.

“Once a publisher establishes addressability, the next challenge is to meet each demand partner’s supply quality requirements such as creative, URL, price, and more,” Bell said. “As we can see from Underdog’s success, when addressability is provided to supply that's in demand, the effects are immediate and quite easy to see.”