Even as post-cookie solutions continue to develop and go through testing, the uncertainty of what the digital ecosystem will look like in the future is still making both publishers and advertisers nervous about what may come.
Conducted by media measurement and analytics company DoubleVerify, the survey polled 800 decision makers from media agencies and publishers globally.
Although concerns remain high, overall publisher concern about the impact of cookie deprecation on their business remains consistent with the first edition of the survey conducted last year, with 60% of publisher respondents indicating they were either “very concerned” or “moderately concerned.” However, those who stated they were “very concerned” decreased year-over-year by 25%.
This concern may come from uncertainty around the most effective solutions and workflows, with only 24% of the surveyed publishers stating they currently had a post-cookie solution in place. The remaining respondents were either still testing or hadn’t yet begun the process.
On the advertiser side, “multiple browsers phasing out third-party cookies” was the most common concern cited amidst recent privacy changes.
A strong feeling from buyers (47.8%) and publishers (44.1%) is that Google will issue another delay to the deprecation process ahead of its self-imposed 2024 deadline.
One of the sharpest differences between this year’s survey and last year’s was in publisher revenue expectations in a post-cookie world. Now, 48% of publishers expect cookie deprecation to have a positive impact on their company’s revenue, down from 64% who said the same in 2022.
Among advertisers, 31% indicate that their ability to target audiences effectively was among their greatest concerns in a cookieless future. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of publishers believed that making data accessible in open-market environments will be one of the biggest challenges with relying on first-party and contextual data.
On the positive side, both publishers and brands believe their own first-party data activation is the cookie-independent solution that holds the most promise for them.
Contextual and attention measurement are the top priorities of both sides of the industry, with 96% of publishers surveyed saying that contextual advertising capabilities will be important for their businesses in 2023, while 76% of them considered the quality of their contextual capabilities as “good” or “very good.”
Looking at advertisers, 94% of respondents say they plan to rely on contextual advertising for at least some of their buys in their 2023 media strategies, and 78% of them say that the contextual advertising capabilities they’ve seen from publishers is “good” or “very good.”
Brands and publishers both see attention’s potential as an advertising currency. Publishers have already started adapting, as 94% of publisher respondents have described attention-based capabilities as important to their business this year. On the buy side, advertisers also plan to rely on attention-based metrics (96%) in either most or some of their ad buys this year.
