In January 2020, a massive shake-up for digital advertising and the internet itself was announced. The golden age of digital marketing will come when the internet becomes privacy-first.
This update seems to be a step in the right direction, and in many ways it is. That is not to say that the motives of the company are pure. Banning third-party cookies makes it harder for competitors to control digital advertising. The company restricts access to data under the guise of a user-first, privacy-focused update.
Not all publishers will be affected by the banning of cookies. Publishers using third-party ad server will be impacted dramatically. Advertisers can use cookie data in real time to determine how much to bid on inventory on demand-side platforms. Without third-party data, traditional publishers can expect their programmatic eCPMs to decline, leading to a drop in ad revenue.
How can publishers get back their ad revenue? Publishers will be forced to rethink their ad strategies and implement new solutions in the near future, as digital advertising won't be as simple as it is now.
Publishers need to start identifying how they can monetize first-party data because it is going to become immensely valuable.
In the long term, unified IDs are unsustainable.
Publishers need to be aware of the drastic shift in digital advertising in order to maintain their ad revenue. Publishers pool together first-party data in an anonymized way to create an ID that can identify users across the supply chain. The solution could use email addresses that were not part of the third-party data.
Many companies are building unified ID programs. Prebid, an open source bidding platform, will support it. There are many different types of ID on the market, each slightly different in terms of implementation and privacy.
Publishers who use the Ad Manager will be helped by a new form of unified ID. Publishers can share first-party data with outside bidders through publisher- provided identifiers. This seems to be the middle ground for protecting privacy and not alienating advertisers. The publishers will have to hand over their first-party data, which leaves a lot of data for the search engine to potentially use.
