Are publishers ready for a cookie-less era? Teads finds out

SINGAPORE—Teads, the global media platform, released its latest research on how prepared publishers are for an era without cookies.

In an update of the survey that was run in 2021, 449 of the world’s best publisher brands, representing a cross-section of small and medium-sized publishers and the largest media companies, responded to questions about their plans for the deprecation of the cookie and which industry initiatives they plan to implement.

Cookie education among publishers has dramatically improved year on year, with 30 percent of publishers now stating “I have a strong understanding of all the new initiatives in the industry and their benefits/drawbacks”. This was up from 23 percent in 2021.

Just 12 percent said “I am unaware of how those changes will effect my business, in APAC when compared to 15 percent globally.”

When asked how platform and regulatory changes in 2021 affected planning for a cookie-less future, 78 percent said such changes have no impact or actually accelerated their plans.

In response to the question “Do you see the deprecation of 3rd-party cookies and/or IDFA/Device IDs as a threat or an opportunity for publishers?”, we saw a 100 percent increase year-on-year with 50 percent of respondents now saying that such changes “give us the opportunity to differentiate through our first party data and the quality of our content.”

When asked which data or targeting solutions they were likely to adopt, only 27 percent said that a privacy sandbox would be considered. Most (63 percent) see first party data as an answer, 59 percent see contextual within their offering, with unique ID seeing a good percentage at 43 percent.

The challenges are most apparent in logins, with only 45 percent of global publishers saying they have a strategy for increasing the utilization of logins and 93 percent saying that 50 percent or less of their users actually do.

Logins pose questions across the publisher journey, with 45 percent worried about impact on user experience and 49 percent worried about the impact on traffic. With others also showing concerns about monitoring inventory monetization capabilities (33 percent), technical implementation of logins (31 percent) and conflict with subscription models (18 percent).

In response to the survey results, Todd Tran, chief strategy officer of Teads, said: “The progression in the past year has been rapid, we’ve moved into a fascinating stage of accelerated learning and adoption of new technologies that are showcasing publishers can thrive in today’s cookie-less world.”

“What’s most encouraging is to see that publishers are making changes to insulate their business models from external factors. By focusing on quality content and first party data, they are giving advertisers the best possible opportunity to buy sustainable media that delivers real business outcomes.”

“It’s a very exciting time for publishers and we’re proud to be working with them on new technologies and solutions, such as our cookie-less tag, for this new cookie-less world.”

(Teads operates a leading, cloud-based end-to-end technology platform that enables programmatic digital advertising across a global ecosystem of quality digital media)