In the years since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) hastened the demise of third-party cookies, advertisers and publishers have been scrambling to retool for a cookieless future.

The search for a solution has intensified as Google’s 2022 deadline for third-party cookie removal approaches; Chrome’s 60% market share means that when that day comes, the party is over.

In response, CMOs are now focused on how to make better use of cookieless solutions like contextual marketing, how to get the most out of first-party data, and how to develop consent-based data platforms.

For instance, Adtech firm Quantcast is building an innovative solution that can take into account multiple signals including contextual, compliance/consent, cohorts, identifiers, and first-party data. Using the Safari (ITP) environment as testing ground, which it believes is a good model of what the future will look like, results with its alpha customers have been very promising.

As Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman recently said, “Privacy is at the centre of the next revolution of digital advertising, publishing and adtech. The challenge is to achieve this while still empowering brands, agencies and publishers to be able to know and grow their audiences.”

Heinz Baumann, Quantcast’s head of product privacy and identity, echoes that sentiment. “GDPR started a new age in which every part of the internet ecosystem requires clear consent from consumers to use their data. Any new identifiers that rise to the top will and should place the consumer at the centre. But that consent must be paired with both deterministic and probabilistic data for accuracy and scale.”

This will require constant innovation.

As new identifiers emerge from many different companies, such as Verizon Media, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk, interoperability will also be critical. “These identifiers cannot be built in isolation,” says Baumann. “Along with innovation and interoperability, the advertising technology community needs to come together with publishers, brands and agencies to define the industry standards for a viable long-term identifier.”

Quantcast has been working with IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc, Prebid, and W3C to help create and define the standard of identification for the advertising ecosystem that places consumer trust, transparency, and control at the centre.

The Quantcast Platform, powered by Ara, a patented AI and machine learning engine, delivers automated insights, marketing performance, and results at scale to drive business growth for customers like TD Bank, Volvo, Westjet, Hyundai and Microsoft.

This platform, which uses first-party instead of third party cookies, is powered by real-time data from 100 million diverse online destinations. “When we talk about data, we don’t mean ‘segments.’ We mean huge real-time data streams: observations about the real world that are directly collected and immediately available,” explains Quantcast CTO Peter Day. Operating at a volume of about 20 petabytes a day, it pairs these observations with real-time campaign monitoring to surface actionable insights and optimize towards the best outcome for every single ad. It is capable of generating a campaign in less than three minutes.

As CEO Feldman says, “We are bringing together our technology leadership in measurement and insights, programmatic advertising, privacy and consent management into a single unified, easy-to-use platform to serve the needs of our customers around the world, and to benefit the open internet.” He adds, “Our position is that we need to help even more in providing an alternative to walled garden approaches. We have the platform, live data, and machine learning capabilities to deliver outstanding outcomes that rival the tech giants and level the advertising playing field for brands, agencies and publishers on the open internet.”

Interested in hearing more? Quantcast is the creator of a new and innovative intelligent audience platform that empowers brands, agencies and publishers to know and grow their audiences, reaching people in the right place, at the right moment. For more info visit our website or reach out to: laura.main@quantcast.com