• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, August 28, 2024

There are many implications stemming from the “whoops, just kidding” announcement of Google no longer forcing the industry to deprecate cookies, but one of them is rather surprising.  It would seem the confusion and uncertainty in third-party cookie usage may result in more media partnerships leading to contextual ad placements rather than spend on the open web.  In fact, we could see a depreciation of open web display as a result.

I spent last week chatting with marketers at a MediaPost Summit, and one of the takeaways was that more advertisers were looking at data as a tool to be indirectly activated by using it to select media partners, rather than using it as direct activation for targeting.

If you rewind a few years, data became “the new oil” because marketers had direct access to the data because of platforms like BlueKai, and so they became more in control of who they targeted and where, with that data feeding the same audiences across multiple solutions.

This was the high point of third party to data, and it led an entirely new direction for advertisers.  As the third-party cookie became the currency of the day, the open web was able to compete handily with the larger walled gardens and retain, if not increase, its share of ad dollars.  Fast-forward back to today though, and third-party cookies are in a purgatory state because of the Google announcements that appear to leave their demise to the average Chrome browser user at some to-be-stated date in the future.

As a result, more advertisers are looking at contextual advertising as a way to find the right audience, and in many cases, they are using data to find context that may not have been obvious, but which still present a high overlap with the desired target.

This is not a use case, but it is one that was put aside for a number of years.  Most advertisers have relied on programmatic display as a means of reaching an audience in a cost-effective way, buying media at a lower price and optimizing for CTR or CTA of some kind.  This strategy led many dollars to be allocated across the open web, and likely sustained many sites, both real and “fake,” with the advent of MFA sites across the internet.  

As more advertisers look at contextual, the best of the open web may do well, but that second or third tier of broader sites may suffer because their access to programmatic inventory may suffer.  Programmatic itself will be fine because the technology can still be used to easily purchase contextual inventory rather than rely on insertion orders and manual methods, but that broader list of sites will no longer be chosen.  Transparency is explicit in contextual, and the open web may see fewer ad dollars once transparency is everywhere again.

Those aforementioned walled gardens are something of an unknown in this landscape.   Large platforms like Google and Meta have lots of contextual advertising opportunities and may well retain much of these dollars.  As context becomes more valuable again, so does the interest in CTV, since it not only presents contextual content, but also has a vast amount of first-party data. In the face of context, CTV and generative search results, we are poised to a completely different media mix in digital, and most advertisers will be taking advantage of these changes quickly.

How is your media strategy changing amid the shifting sands of the Google announcement?