Who said cookieless targeting doesn’t scale?

Dotdash Meredith’s cookieless targeting tool, D/Cipher, has propelled the publisher to a 12% increase in digital ad revenue year-over-year, marking the second consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.  

D/Cipher is proving its worth in driving campaigns like the one the media company conducted with Pandora. The campaign resulted in 76% higher foot traffic when compared to other targeting methods. 

But this isn’t just about impressive numbers. It’s about Dotdash Meredith setting a new standard in the industry. With third-party cookies becoming obsolete, their ability to pivot and innovate with tools like D/Cipher is a masterclass in adaptation. 

“The performance is amazing because the industry is always trying to find ways to tie media buys to real results. This proves that Dotdash Meredith can drive national brick-and-mortar sales for a brand without any cookie or identifier,” Lindsay Van Kirk, Senior Vice President and General Manager of D/Cipher told ADWEEK. 

The publisher’s success is part of a broader narrative vividly discussed at the recent AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Boston. Let’s connect the dots between Dotdash Meredith’s achievements and the strategies shared by top publishers.

Connecting the Dots from Publisher Forum

Several sessions highlighted how publishers leverage data to secure ad spend and ensure brand safety, aligning perfectly with Dotdash Meredith’s success story. Conversations weren’t merely about surviving the post-cookie apocalypse — they were about thriving.

Data-Driven Strategies:

Patrick McCarthy, SVP, Programmatic Monetization, Dotdash Meredith, emphasized the importance of big data in ad operations. “We are a very data-driven company. When you go into meetings with our C-suite team, hunches really aren’t acceptable. Our whole programmatic and advertising part of our business is really driven by our CFO and Chief Innovation Officer, who is a former data scientist. Data is absolutely paramount to making your case for new investment, for new products to be rolled out,”  he said.

This reflects D/Cipher’s ability to utilize first-party data and contextual signals to outperform traditional cookie-based methods. He also highlighted the role of predictive analytics and real-time data applications. The publisher is proving that first-party data and advanced analytics are the future.

Echoing the power of data, Jesse Waldele, SVP, Digital Operations and Client Success at Dow Jones, shared how they’ve ditched third-party data in favor of first-party insights, fueling more effective ad solutions. Their “Thematic AI” tool, which predicts the best content placement using AI, has driven noticeable performance lifts for advertisers. Dow Jones’ focus on real-time measurement ensures that advertisers keep rebooking.

While the benefits of big data are clear, reliance on it also comes with obstacles. The high cost of data management and the risk of data privacy issues can be a significant barrier for smaller publishers.

Brand Suitability and First-Party Data:

In her keynote, Jana Meron, Vice President of Revenue Operations & Data, The Washington Post, discussed the power of first-party data in achieving brand suitability and effective ad placements. She noted, “The intersection of deterministic and probabilistic first-party data is where we get our power.”

The Washington Post observed a 3x performance lift when using first-party data compared to third-party data with standard display, and a 5x lift when integrating custom ad units designed for their audience.

While first-party data offers significant benefits in targeting and personalization, the session also highlighted potential downsides, such as difficulties in scaling deterministic data due to the reliance on user logins, which can limit reach. Additionally, there are concerns about balancing privacy with data collection, as overly aggressive data strategies might lead to consumer pushback or regulatory scrutiny.

Still, The Washington Post’s direction is a fundamental shift in how publishers view and leverage their audience data. By focusing on the nuances of their data, publishers can create a more personalized and effective advertising ecosystem, which is essential as consumers become increasingly wary of invasive data practices.

Harnessing Audience Power: Future’s Strategy

Jeff Goldstein, Head of Programmatic at Future, offered a compelling keynote on the importance of understanding and harnessing audience passions. He explained how Future’s approach to audience segmentation — dividing users into “practical intenders” and “passionate intenders” — has allowed the publisher to optimize its content and ad strategies.

Goldstein shared that through their first-party data platform, Aperture, Future has identified high-intent users, leading to a 30% higher purchase likelihood among these users. He emphasized the value of deep audience insights and the role of AI-driven data in refining targeting strategies.

Future’s approach underscores the value of deep audience insights, enabling them to create more personalized and effective media products. By leveraging AI and contextual data, Future exceeds advertiser expectations, driving better outcomes across its 200+ owned and operated properties.

ID Bridging: Navigating the Benefits and Risks

In another session, the topic of ID bridging was explored in depth, highlighting how this technology enables publishers to maintain addressable audiences in a cookieless environment. Ianna Feliciano, Senior Director, Programmatic Advertising, Raptive, and Jasper Liu, Senior Programmatic Yield Analyst, Daily Mail, explained how ID bridging allows for deterministic and probabilistic matching across devices and browsers. While deterministic matching offers precision, it often lacks scale. On the other hand, probabilistic matching provides greater reach but with potential trade-offs in accuracy.

The speakers also explained the risks associated with ID bridging, such as increased complexity in managing multiple ID partners and the potential for data leakage, which can have severe privacy implications. Additionally, the costs associated with ID bridging can be significant, especially when considering the need for continuous vendor management and compliance with evolving privacy regulations.

But when connected with the right partners, ID bridging is becoming essential for maintaining campaign effectiveness in the face of increasing privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies. The session emphasized the importance of choosing the right ID-bridging partners and continually testing and adapting strategies to balance accuracy, scale, and compliance with privacy laws.

Innovative Revenue Strategies:

The “One Big Problem” session, a town hall publisher-only conversation, underscored the challenges and strategies in ramping up revenue. One standout solution was monetizing social media audiences. Publishers are turning their social followers into a goldmine, leveraging these platforms to drive engagement and revenue. This strategy, highlighted by some ad ops leaders shows the innovative ways publishers are navigating the post-cookie landscape.

This strategy doesn’t come without its downsides though. Relying heavily on social platforms means publishers are subject to the algorithms and policies of those platforms, which can change suddenly and impact reach and monetization.

Another exciting approach discussed during the Forum was Deal Curation as a Service (DCaaS). This strategy empowers publishers to showcase and monetize high-quality inventory effectively, leveraging first-party data for improved targeting and higher CPMs. Yet, implementing DCaaS can be resource-intensive, requiring significant investments in technology and data management. It can also lead to increased operational complexity, as publishers must manage and coordinate with multiple partners and ensure the integrity of their curated deals. 

In the long haul, DCaaS enables publishers to regain control over their inventory, creating a more curated and valuable marketplace that benefits publishers and advertisers alike. As Scott Messer of Messer Media explained, DCaaS alleviates costs, aggregates sales efforts, and delivers a good product.

The Existential Crisis and Future-Proofing Revenue

Despite Google’s flip-flop on third-party cookies, savvy publishers are already adapting. Our recent Publisher Pulse report, Ramping Up Your Revenue: Digital Publishers Reveal Key Growth Strategies, shows that 71% of publishers are investing in new tools and technologies to drive revenue growth, with the most invested tools including audience segmentation (65%), identity resolution (50%), and AI-driven/advanced analytics platforms (40%).

But this isn’t just about technology for technology’s sake, it’s about addressing the existential crisis of trust and relevance. Publishers like Dotdash Meredith, The Washington Post, and Future are leading the way, demonstrating that investing in first-party data and contextual targeting is key to thriving in a cookieless world.

As Dotdash Meredith’s McCarthy explained, predictive analytics and real-time data are revolutionizing how we approach ad operations, ensuring we stay ahead of the curve. This aligns seamlessly with the broader industry trends discussed at the Forum, showing a unified move towards data-driven, privacy-safe ad tech solutions.

The landscape is shifting, and those who don’t adapt will be left behind. Since many of these approaches may require significant investment in technology and talent, it’s a survival of the fittest scenario, where only the most innovative and forward-thinking publishers will thrive. Regardless of the size of your operation, your best bet is to start small and keep testing iteratively.

Innovation must be balanced with caution — embrace your data, invest in the right tools, and keep innovating.

Editor’s Update 08/14/2024 An earlier version of this article omitted insights from Jesse Waldele, SVP of Digital Operations and Client Services at Dow Jones, and Jeff Goldstein, Head of Programmatic at Future’s keynote.

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From the start, Jon Roberts kicked off PubForum Coronado Island with profound insight giving the event great momentum. Much of the audience left with the lasting idea that sometimes unexpected journeys lead to groundbreaking discoveries. 

Don’t be afraid to take risks and try new things, publishers. We see this through Roberts’ unique career journey and his assistance in shifting Dotdash Meredith to focus on improving user experience instead of bombarding users with ads. The strategies he and his team implemented to increase user engagement and better understand the publisher’s audience helped reshape Dotdash Meredith’s revenue model positively.

While his journey from research scientist to a digital media professional might seem far-fetched, this path is more common than one may think. From this crossover of disciplines, we see that data analysis, experimentation, and problem-solving skills from the scientific world are of high value in digital media. 

There’s a science behind increasing revenue and effectively targeting audiences in a cookieless world. According to Jon Roberts, these are your four keys to success:

Take Risk: No Risk, No Reward

If there’s one thing science and data have in common, it’s experimentation. Starting his career focusing on dark matter and cosmic phenomena at prestigious institutions like CERN and NASA, Roberts sees data as the central theme in making a transition from science to digital media. Our industry holds loads of data, and its potential for guiding decision-making and audience targeting is immense. The scale of data available presents a playground for experimentation.

At Dotdash Meredith, Roberts and his team implemented transformative strategies that seemed crazy at first since they challenged the conventional approach. These moves were made when the company was small, so at that time, no risk meant no reward. They took revoked ads from web pages in hopes of enhancing user experience. While this calculated risk initially seemed backward, it paved the way for their innovative revenue model. 

Analyze your practices and closely examine ad placements. This can help you identify bad ads. At one point, Dotdash Meredith had to remove a ton of ads from their webpages. This move initially hurt their revenue but helped shape the advertising landscape overall. 

Unravel the Floor Pricing Strategy

Floor pricing can be very complex, which is why it is important to think strategically. According to Roberts, the first step is to break down the value of all the slots to learn what the market will pay. Different domains have different values. Different content drives a different value and then different slots. 

When you look at those features and floors by grouping your inventory that fallsl into these buckets, you can see valued inventory and then push the price up to see how the market responds. 

“We intentionally let 15% of the ads go to house ads because that actually makes us more money because it pushes up what people pay,” Roberts explained. “If you let people buy that 15% of inventory for what they’ll pay for it you get all the long tail scammy advertisers of the internet buying them for pennies. If you put the floor at $10, for example, the people who would have paid $5 for it end up paying $10.”

Develop a Real Understanding of User Intent 

Understanding user intent in the present moment is far more valuable than relying solely on historical data. It’s time to say goodbye to the cookie-based approach and hello to an intent-based approach.

Roberts encourages publishers to think more keenly about intent-based targeting, as it harnesses real-time users’ behavior on content from their tailored ads to match their behaviors. Users’ interests and actions are in constant flux, so present behavior must be at the forefront. 

When you work with the right advertisers, on the right content, with the right message, you will see your engagement go through the roof. If a consumer is on a page doing one thing and the ad on the page is relevant to what they are doing, they will surely click it. 

Historically, contextual targeting doesn’t scale, so you have to talk about the context on the page and feed the user’s intent. 

Think Outside the Typical Measurement Box

Another thing that Roberts highlights is that targeting is easy, but measurement is hard, and while calling targeting easy may be a stretch, getting the targeting to work is relatively straightforward. Getting it to run through all the pipes is more of a challenge because the businesses are so reliant on cookies at this time.

At DotDash Meredith, they are experimenting with some SSP and DSP partners, and learning just how deep the cookie logic is in the weeds. This is where measurement is critical Roberts says, “If you can run a campaign on a cookieless market but can’t explain to your boss that it worked and you cashed out, what’s the point?” 

“We just have to acknowledge that we could never measure everything. If you go through the list of ways clients are looking to measure the efficacy of campaigns, you’ll see first click attribution, or even 30-day lookbacks,” Roberts explained. “But you also have sales lift, brand lift, foot traffic to store. The industry has told itself that deterministic tracking of Internet ads is the only way to do it. So, therefore, if you can’t track, it doesn’t exist.” 

Work with your Privacy Sandbox teams. Targeting is a piece of that, and much of Privacy Sandbox is about measurement and attribution, PPID for frequency capping, and the attribution API to have anonymous but full attribution. These are all tools that need to exist to solve the measurement problem. 

From being a physicist to transitioning into the media industry, Robert’s story is a testament to the power of multidisciplinary thinking and applying scientific principles to solve complex problems in new domains. He has used his expertise in data analysis, experimentation, and understanding complex systems to pave the way for innovative approaches to user experience, targeting, and measurement in the digital media landscape. 

As the ad tech landscape continues to evolve, the infusion of scientific thinking has the power to drive the industry forward.

The post Identifying the Broken Publisher Revenue Model to Create New Opportunities appeared first on AdMonsters.

Before joining Dotdash Meredith, Roberts was a theoretical physicist focused on making dark matter predictions for the hadron collider at CERN and cosmic ray predictions for the AMS detector on the International Space Station. He also created the first-ever canon maps of Game of Thrones for Random House and George R. R. Martin’s “The Lands of Ice and Fire.”

 Roberts says that maps empower people to make decisions using data by helping them understand a way forward. 

 “Mapmaking is an exercise in data-powered decision making, whether it’s in the front of a fantasy novel where I’m helping the reader make a logical choice, or in business where I hand over information in a way that other people can then make informed decisions off a common understanding and framework,” said Roberts.

Just like maps, publishers face a great deal of data and decision-making as they approach the loss of third-party cookies. During his keynote at the AdMonsters Publisher Forum, “Publishers Take the Wheel: Effective Audience Targeting in a Cookieless World,” Roberts will share how publishers can leverage intent data for ad targeting at scale.

 Solving Problems From Physicist to Publisher

Roberts has been with Dotdash Meredith since 2013. As Chief Innovation Officer, Roberts oversees research, data science, and open market revenue. He was previously the President, Health & Finance, overseeing strategy for Verywell, Health, Parents, Investopedia, and The Balance, and has held various senior leadership roles, including Head of Data Science. 

Before Dotdash Meredith, Roberts spent ten years as a theoretical physicist, bringing that training to his current role.

“As a physicist, you must be confident to take on problems and believe they are fixable. That belief gives me the mindset to tackle publishing challenges with an impatience to solve them,” expressed Roberts. 

And right now, that challenge is solving ad targeting for publishers before the cookie gets deprecated in 2024. Roberts believes ad targeting that will work, and scale isn’t with identity targeting but with intent-based targeting. 

“Trying to rebuild an identity signal across a cookieless environment is going back and fighting the fight that’s already been fought and lost. I think targeting who somebody might have been four weeks ago is much less effective than targeting who they are right now. Non-identity or intent-based targeting unlocks the full scale of a publisher,” said Roberts.

Connecting at Key Moments of Intent

In May, Dotdash Meredith launched D/Cipher, a tool that provides intent-based ad targeting without cookies. D/Cipher is based on billions of Dotdash Meredith’s proprietary consumer interactions and content signals from its 40+ brands that help 30 million people daily, providing the publisher with a unique data set.

 “If we were a news publisher, we would tell the world what to care about. We are much more a service publisher, so the world tells us,” shared Roberts. “Our data gives us a heartbeat of the entire world every day.” 

D/Cipher reaches users on all devices and platforms, including Apple (iOS) audiences previously unreachable by advertising cookies for the past two years, estimated at more than 50% of U.S. digital users. 

So, how does D/Cipher reach the right person, at the right time, without cookies? 

Roberts gives the example of targeting a parent reading articles about family vacations versus looking for a Negroni recipe. The promise of cookie targeting is knowing that the person is a parent, but intent-based targeting is knowing a person is being a parent at that moment. 

“Engaging the parent with the right messaging when they’re in that mindset is powerful and requires no prior knowledge of the person. A drink recipe is when they’re specifically not being a parent, and they don’t want to see your messaging even if you got the targeting right,” explains Roberts. “We’ve removed the guesswork and only reach people when they’re ready to receive your message. It’s not surprising that we see vastly higher performance with intent targeting than with cookie targeting.”

Guaranteeing a Non-Identity-Based Approach

As part of the D/Cipher launch, the publisher announced the Dotdash Meredith Performance Guarantee, which promises performance lift versus cookie-based or other audience-based targeting for marketers using the D/Cipher tool. 

Roberts shared that the guarantee’s goal is not for advertisers to shift their entire buying strategy to only intent-based targeting. Instead, Dotdash Meredith wants advertisers to simultaneously test and then scale both a cookie-based or identity-based approach and a non-cookie and non-identity-based approach in the lead-up to a cookieless environment. 

“We can learn so much with a side-by-side comparison. We as an industry must get comfortable with non-identity-based targeting and measurement in the next year to 18 months so that when the cookie gets fully deprecated, you’re not trying to figure out how to do cookieless targeting in the second half of 2024 because you’re going to be doing it with little data to play with and a lot of disruption,” cautioned Roberts.

Roberts says that as America’s largest publisher, it means Dotdash Meredith is in a position to help the industry and is confident in its guarantee.

“We guarantee you that your intent-based campaign will outperform the cookie-based campaign. We know it works because we’ve been doing this a long time, and that takes the risk off the table,” said Roberts.

The post AdMonsters Publisher Forum Keynote Dr. Jon Roberts: Innovating Audience Targeting for a Cookieless World appeared first on AdMonsters.