Promising Alternative Targeting Methods in a Post-Cookie World

In his video interview with Pharmaceutical Executive, Ted Sweetser, VP, Ad Partnerships and Strategy, PurpleLab explored the challenges and opportunities in healthcare advertising, particularly in the context of increasing data privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies. The discussion highlighted the importance of leveraging real-world data (RWD) to gain valuable insights into patient behavior and preferences. RWD, when combined with advanced analytics and privacy-compliant targeting techniques, enables more effective and targeted advertising campaigns. The conversation also touched on the potential impact of cookie deprecation on the broader advertising industry and the need for advertisers to adapt to a more privacy-centric approach.

What are the most promising alternative targeting methods that can be adopted by advertisers in a post-cookie world, and how do they compare to traditional approaches?

I will say because, you know, we're a month or so out from maybe it's not a full month out from the Google trial, and as part of this ongoing you know, court case, Google has announced that they're not going to deprecate cookies. They're going to add an opt out mechanism. Well, that may or may not go into effect, depending on what various European jurisdictions say about anti competitiveness, it does seem to make it all the more likely if Google's opt out mechanism operates similar to the way that Apple did theirs. That cookies, third party cookies, I should say, because first party cookies are not going away and. Will continue to decline substantially. So that being the case damned if you do, damned if you don't.

On the cookie deprecation front, as I referenced earlier, first party opted in. You know, consent to market is huge. So, we see more publishers putting up gates asking you to provide your email and creating a value exchange there, where you can access their content in exchange for getting more personalized marketing. The two leaders in that space are probably the trade desk and live ramps, authentication solutions, although you see large publishers adopting their own as well, being able to tie that all together on the SSP end, or in the DSP is probably the single most significant way that people will continue to deliver relevant messaging through audience solutions in the near future. For our part, we are fully on board with that approach, although we do recognize that one of the downsides of it is that not everyone is going to opt in. Various parties are going to argue about what percentage of people will opt in. I've heard it wasn't as bad as people anticipated when Apple did it, but TBD on that front.

The end result of all that is, though, that there is going to be a set of impressions that were formerly addressable using third party cookies that are no longer addressable. I'm very interested in this category, what I come to think of as remnant inventory, inventory that's not tied to an individual ID of some kind, because I don't think it's worthless. I think, in fact, it could be potentially quite valuable, because assuming that you have validation tools in place to ensure that it's not fraud or bad traffic, you have something that other people will not be bidding on, which means that it will be cheaper to buy, and that is potentially reaching a relevant consumer. So, one of the major trends, in addition to, you know, finding cookie replacements, I think there was a major person in the space recently who said the cookie will never die, by which they meant that, you know, ramp ID and UID would come and fill in its place. Is curation of inventory. So that is taking audiences and applying them more at the SSP level, to do you know, more direct buys from the publishers of things that you believe to be being served to people in a given audience.

There's been some dispute about the efficiency of that technique, but it does probably improve the addressability of the population overall. But I do think that you know this, this set of no longer addressable inventory which is being served to people and be made valuable through understanding the preferences of patients. And this is where, you know, we take our special sauce of purple lab data and partnerships with you know, people who have access to a lot of inventory to do large scale statistical analysis of, you know, what are the consumer preference trends of patients who match a given diagnosis? So, are there particular types of content that say people with type two diabetes prefer to engage with, or people with sickle cell disease or some other condition? This has the added benefit, of course, if you're just looking at an understanding of, you know, media or channel preference, you are completely removing the individual from the media buying so extremely privacy proof and that there is no you know, individual cookie or ID of any kind in the buying process.