Without Google’s cookie cutoff hanging over them, buyers are lukewarm on alternative IDs

Media buyers responded by testing these alternative identifiers for audience targeting and measurement. But without the cookie cutoff hanging over the industry (or their clients), they aren’t pursuing alt-IDs with the same fervor.

“There is a very mixed bag still in the general response,” said Kyle Holloway, svp and head of identity at IPG Mediabrands’ data unit Acxiom. “And once Google scrapped its deadline, client queries about a cookie-less future died back. Urgency kind of fell out of the system.”

As of January, alternative identifiers are now present in 70% of cookie-less bid transactions, up from 65% in October, according to data from ad tech firm Bidswitch. In other words, most impressions available to buyers are indexed against at least one alternative to third-party cookies.

“Naturally, usage will follow availability,” said Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of ID5.

Still, there’s a “lag” between ad tech firms and publishers making impressions with alt-IDs available and buyers and advertisers actually using them, Roche said.

Alternatives to the alternatives

Uncertainty breeds inertia, so it was always likely that alternative identifiers would stall while third-party cookies lingered in the industry’s most important browser. Why gamble on the new when the old still works — sort of? Google, for its part, has yet to roll out the consumer opt-out it promised last year, and many buyers are still leaning on cookies wherever they can.

Rory Latham, senior director of global investment and programmatic at GroupM, estimated that as much as 50% of impressions in the programmatic bid stream still have cookies. Bidswitch’s data suggests that cookies remain in up to 80% of Chrome traffic.

One reason buyers aren’t moving at full speed towards alt-IDs is that they have more ways to avoid the cookie than they did when Google’s deprecation plan was first tabled.

They can turn to retail media networks for first-party audience data or wholly cookie-less approaches like contextual targeting to direct ad investments.

“We are continuing to push for things … that don’t necessarily rely on IDs,” said Alex Block, evp of programmatic at Jellyfish.

There’s also the fact that some advertisers — particularly those outside the S&P 500 — still aren’t equipped to make the move away from cookies.

“It’s very dependent on their sophistication with regards to first party data,” said Alison LeRoque, vp and director of integrated client strategy at independent media shop Novus, which works with several regional advertisers.

Marketers in smaller teams, wielding smaller budgets than their blue-chip peers, are prone to ask if investments in data architecture are really needed.

“Is it worth all this setup, paying all these fees, leveraging all of this tech? At the end of the day, what’s the ROI on all this setup?” LeRoque said, echoing client concerns.

None of this is to say media buyers aren’t supportive of alternative identifiers.

Tinuiti’s Harry Browne, who is vp of TV, audio and display innovation at the independent media agency, said the “majority” of the agency’s streaming TV buys involved an alternative identifier, typically The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0.

Browne said the removal of Google’s deadline didn’t change Tinuiti’s approach to alt-ID adoption.

“It has neither sped up nor slowed down. We have continued as if cookies are going away,” he said.

But gauging the breadth and depth of the usage of these alternatives — and the size of the lag between supply and demand — isn’t easy.

Partly, that’s due to bid throttling — a practice which means that supply-side platforms (SSPs) only send demand-side platforms (DSPs) impressions that are most likely to be of value, rather than putting their entire inventory up for grabs. So, even if alternative identifiers are available for the majority of cookie-less transactions, they might not be across the impressions actually being bid upon because a proportion are “chopped off” en route, according to Latham.

Performance over philosophy

But most of all, without the insistence of clients concerned about losing signal or performance levels with the cookie’s fading, there’s just less impetus to pursue cookie-less targeting and measurement solutions.

“They’re not asking about it,” said Block.

Instead, performance is the first and ultimate priority.

“We’ve been testing a lot of these solutions for years, and it’s [now] more about how they fit into the overall KPIs of a client,” said Latham.

Ultimately, marketers want more precise, less wasteful targeting. Between the competition, tariffs, interest rates and their own much-reduced budgets, they’ve got a lot on their plates — and, save for the most dedicated, there’s not much interest in how the sausage gets made. “There’s only very few really large advertisers who think about it,” said John Thankamony, managing director of addressable media and total commerce at Dentsu UK.

Latham added that it’s “very rare” for clients to ask for the use of specific alt-IDs.

Indeed, when pitching for new clients, media agencies no longer emphasize the cookie-less capabilities of their targeting and measurement solutions.

Instead, the likes of Havas and Interpublic are focusing on the ability of their respective internal tools Converged or Integral to drive campaign performance.

“From an agency or brand standpoint, you want to reach your audience. … How that happens doesn’t really matter,” said Roche.

Until Google opens the levees by releasing its consumer opt-out for third-party cookies, it’s likely that alt-ID adoption will continue to crawl.