MAD//Anywhere highlights: Cookies will die – but it won’t kill cross-media audience measurement

The death of third-party cookies has led to concerns on how the ad-tech ecosystem will be influenced. But in fact, it is a good thing and a natural evolution that you should not be worried about. At MAD//Anywhere, our Chief Sales Officer and Co-founder, Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen, explained why.

Third-party cookies were never great to begin with

Relying purely on cookies to stitch together complex media behaviour patterns has been fiction for quite some time due to a number of challenges: short-lived cookies, ad blockers, an explosion of devices per user, ID fragmentation across browsers and applications, ITP, GDPR, etc. In other words, cookies have been a dubious data source for many years, which is an inconvenient truth that many have chosen to ignore.

Cookie bean-counting reigns supreme no longer

However, now the spell is broken. Cookie bean-counting no longer reigns supreme. No longer is it enough to keep count of the reach and frequency of your campaign using cookie-based counting. This method has been obsolete for a while, and that’s why market research is now having its revival.

If there is one thing market researchers are good at, it is to infer solid estimates based on incomplete, often seemingly incompatible, data sets. And that’s exactly what the future has in store for measurement.

It’s unrealistic to assume that today’s multi-fragmented media landscape will yield itself to some uniform standard when it comes to the data generated from each media. Any cross-media measurement solution will have to deal with multiple data formats, each having to be transformed, ingested, and analysed in real-time.

The challenge is real

Now, make no mistake. The challenge is real. Each media provides its own – obviously, always awesome – numbers, but what no one provides the advertisers with is the key stats that really matters for a brand: across all media, am I reaching a tiny bit of my target group over and over again or am I reaching almost all of them a few times?

This is the answer that only solid market research can give. And that’s the opportunity as well as the challenge. But if we meet the challenge, the road will be paved with gold.

Key components for cross-media audience measurement

The advertisers’ North Star presented in the WFA framework for cross-media measurement is a good example of the importance advertisers’ attach to the challenge.

At AudienceProject, we believe that you need to have at least five components in place to provide valid and actionable cross-media audience measurement.

1. Good and large panels to have a source of truth.
2. Deep integrations with especially walled gardens to extract meaningful data to embed in the measurement.
3. Defined standards across media platforms to compare ad impacts across media.
4. Advanced inferential statistics embedded in powerful software to ingest and analyse data in real-time.
5. Privacy protections built directly into the software.

If we build such systems, which is challenging but doable, we’re very close to obtaining the goal of the advertisers’ North Star, which should be the holy grail for market research in the cookie-less world.

Get the full experience

If you want to get all the details from the presentation by Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen and learn more about AudienceProject’s perspective on cross-media audience measurement in a post-cookie-world, you can watch the presentation in its full length below. Enjoy!