Any marketer or publisher reading the news recently can’t help but wonder what role cookies will play in the future. Browser constraints, privacy regulations, and consumer backlash are just some of the challenges that tip the scales which have long balanced consumer choice and consent with the need for advertising revenues to keep the open Internet free.
It’s a conundrum that all players in the ecosystem need to solve together. At Criteo, we’re focused on the soundest way to maintain addressability in a cookieless world and ensure marketers can connect with consumers through free content from publishers.
Consumers want their data handled with the utmost care, in a privacy-centric manner, while receiving personalized and relevant content. Marketers need to ensure they’re spending their budgets effectively and look for tools to ensure their messages reach the right people at the right time and respect frequency capping and suppression capabilities. Publishers create and provide content and rely on advertising revenue to keep that content available and free. After all, democracy relies on the free press and the free press relies on advertising.
Criteo is committed to providing marketers with access to all possible inventory sources in a privacy-first manner so that marketers know that every impression bought can be independently and transparently measured. This requires a scaled identity solution. Criteo, along with its partners and clients, has developed one of the world’s largest open deterministic identity graphs.
We are proud to announce that we’re deepening our existing support of LiveRamp’s IdentityLink graph as one of the largest global DSPs to bid on IdentityLink. This new capability offers marketers the highest possible match rates for people-based marketing campaigns, increasing access to people-based inventory in a privacy-by-design manner and is a competitive (if not superior) alternative to the walled gardens. Every impression bought with an IdentityLInk can be measured with IdentityLink – transparently and in the brand’s choice of data environment.
IdentityLink ties directly to ad inventory through publisher and SSP integrations, enabling access to digital, mobile, connected TV, and cookie-less inventory. As IdentityLink is a deterministic people-based ID, it doesn’t rely on the use of third-party cookies. It’s a people-based way of approaching identity. By bidding on IdentityLink, Criteo enables its clients to automatically access new inventory sources and additional reach as it expands into emerging forms of media.
Our partnership with LiveRamp also extends to the offline world as we know digital campaigns significantly impact offline sales – sales that are hard to track without people-based identity. Mutual Criteo and LiveRamp customers can onboard their offline data to Criteo via both Criteo’s Shopper Graph and LiveRamp’s IdentityLink, and then leverage Criteo’s technology to optimize and measure campaigns, drawing insights that were not previously possible.
This makes it simple to connect impressions to offline data, including transaction data, and provide marketers with a fuller view of their campaigns. Unlike walled gardens, the data are freely accessible to any marketer utilizing Criteo – marketers can take the exposure logs and measure independently and transparently.
While all this is a significant benefit to marketers, ultimately, it’s the consumer that wins. By bidding on IdentityLink, Criteo creates a better consumer experience by linking both online and offline identifiers in a privacy-conscious manner. Instead of a cookie-based opt-out, consumers can persistently opt-out at the person level regardless of device or cookie.
The future of digital advertising is people-based. The entire digital marketing industry will benefit from solutions that provide consent and choice to consumers while ensuring that marketers can effectively communicate to relevant audiences and that publishers can continue offering valuable content across the open web. Our goal is to help drive a scaled identity solution that balances all those needs in an open ecosystem that is fair for all participants.
