• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 8, 2024

IPG Mediabrands' Kinesso unit is rolling out a new process to help clients assess -- and ideally mitigate -- potential risks from substantive technological shifts.

The approach, dubbed the "Emerging Tech Assessment," begins by helping clients understand the impact that cookie deprecation will have on the ROI of media in their campaign performance, and it claims it is the first of its kind from a holding company to explicitly model the pre- and post- impact of a Big Tech change on the performance of client campaigns across all the media channels they impact in terms or return on media-buying investments.

"We've heard from partners that this is the most comprehensive approach in terms of its granularity to ROI on media investment," says Global Head of Analytics Chris Schimkat, adding that in the case of cookie deprecation it is assessing the risk and modeling ways to mitigate it across programmatic, search and social channels.

The process begins by a stringent audit and assessment of each client's current campaign performance across each medium currently dependent on cookie-based audience targeting. In the case of social, Schimkat says the impact primarily will be on campaign performance occurring off-platform.

After benchmarking current cookie-based campaign media performance, Kinesso models likely outcomes based on its proprietary approach and buckets each client into "high-," "medium-" and "low-risk" scenarios and makes recommendations on how to mitigate downside -- and possibly even create some upsides -- based on the post-cookie impact to them.

Schimkat says it's too early to discuss average impacts and outcomes, but he believes media mixes will be altered based on the process, although it's premature to say who the winners and losers might be.

In terms of reallocating the mix, he says "econometric modeling is going to be absolutely critical as something like multi-touch attribution continues to have signal dimming" due to the loss of real-time cookie-based audience data.

While econometric modeling generally is based on regression models, he says some advances in machine learning are enabling more algorithmic approaches to adapt a more real-time understanding of campaign performance.

"We've run quite a few assessments already, and we're beginning to get a picture of the average," Schimkat says, but said it's too early to share those results publicly.

In terms of assessing the risk to advertisers and their media buys based on future disruptive media shifts, he says it's too early to say and Kinesso is focused mainly on pre- and post- cookie deprecation scenarios.

"As that change rolls out, we want to quickly understand what the impact is on the media mix today," he notes.