Next-gen solutions: Reaching the unknown after the cookie crumbles

This post is sponsored by Yahoo.

The shift to a cookie-less world is imminent and undeniable. In recent years, marketers have constantly engaged in dynamic conversations on what will happen once the cookie crumbles, and how the industry will move forward for good.

Cookies provide a foundation for digital advertising, serving as a connection between the user, publisher, and advertiser. But as privacy preferences around the world shift alongside evolving legislation and regulation, advertisers and publishers are compelled to seek new identity solutions that can bridge the identity gap across digital channels and deliver revenue – while honouring privacy preferences and maintaining meaningful, relevant, and useful consumer experiences.

The launch of Apple’s iOS 14.5 has enabled users to opt out of app tracking, providing a preview of what will transpire when cookie-based targeting as we know it is disrupted. The sooner brands realise this, the better they can safeguard themselves, plan ahead, and future-proof their marketing initiatives.

Forging direct consumer relationships is a clear way forward in providing much-needed information to bridge the gap that cookies will leave behind. Yet even then, there still exists a gaping hole in the cookie-less pie – in fact, today, 30% of ad opportunities are without advertising IDs, with more than 75% of all ad opportunities expected to be identity-less by 2024.

Next-Gen Solutions: Wielding millions of real-time signals for identity-less audiences

There will be times when you’ll reach a plateau with identifiable audiences, and further scrambling for addressable inventory can implicate cost-effectiveness – which will require you to find an optimal and cost-beneficial solution to address unknown audiences.

Providing solutions today for the cookie-less future, Yahoo has developed a hybrid and integrated approach to reaching known and unknown consumers in a precise and privacy-centric manner. These include Yahoo ConnectID, which leverages its identity graph and first-party data from its owned and operated properties; and Next-Gen Solutions, a solution for non-addressable environments through advanced contextual and machine learning – connecting with quality audiences at scale by leveraging millions of signals.

Providing an end-to-end solution for identity-less inventory, Next-Gen Solutions takes an innovative approach to audience creation, buying and optimisation, and measurement beyond cookies and identity-based inventory.

Audience creation: The cookie-less future has given rise to the resurgence of contextual targeting. Yet traditional contextual tools that rely on content alone have their limitations compared with identity-based addressability and targeting.

Next-Gen Solutions, through Next-Gen Audiences, takes an innovative approach to audience creation for non-addressable environments, beyond content at scale, by leveraging content and other real-time signals to infer audience characteristics in a privacy-centric manner.

Powered by high-performing first-party data – a sample of identity traffic from Yahoo ConnectID – Yahoo’s machine learning model infers high-quality audiences using a mix of real-time signals, including content, location, weather and device type for increased accuracy.

This helps create a complete and accurate picture of audiences while respecting privacy preferences as more users continue to opt out of tracking.

Buying and optimisation: Beyond audience creation, Yahoo’s Next-Gen Solutions also introduces a new suite of machine learning-driven solutions that offer ID-less functionality, built and trained on its proprietary first-party data, and natively integrated into the platform for seamless buying while continuing to protect user privacy.

Resolving frequency capping within unaddressable environments, Next-Gen Buying uses machine learning to limit overexposures, and maintain healthy end-user ad experiences even in ID-less inventories. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s machine-learning optimisation algorithm, AdLearn, effectively bids on non-measurable supply.

Measurement: As cookies and mobile app IDs disappear, conversion blind spots and inaccuracies are set to significantly increase, severely limiting the ability to connect touch-points for measurement.

Next-Gen Solutions covers measurement and attribution for addressable and non-addressable inventory through a mix of proprietary and third-party methodologies to help advertisers maintain omni-channel insights and measurement in a cookie-less world, with holistic and transparent attribution reporting.

This full-stack solution, as we make headway in a cookie and identity-less world, provides a formidable alternative to the cookie as evidenced by results on reach, performance, and efficiency.

Next-Gen Solutions has helped Yahoo’s clients achieve on average a 39% increase in impressions and 20% more clicks on non-addressable web inventory.

One such campaign with a Hong Kong-based insurance partner, for example, managed to garner a 19% increase in click-through rates and a 40% optimised cost-per-click after the activation of Next-Gen Solutions, proving that brands can still achieve impact even when faced with the deprecation of cookies and a growing unaddressable inventory.

As we forge ahead with a cookie-less and identity-less future, marketers don’t need to feel disconnected from their audiences. For sustained success even after the cookie demise, marketers must embrace new and privacy-centric solutions to reach audiences and find ways to connect them to their passions, even in identity-less environments.

Learn more about Yahoo’s Next-Gen Solutions here.