Jamie Toward, head of data UK & Netherlands at Teads, joins us to discuss the cookie continuation, the current data landscape, and why cookieless should be full-steam ahead regardless.

Given the evolving data landscape, how can advertisers adapt strategies to maintain targeted and effective ad campaigns?

Let’s be clear, Google’s announcement shouldn’t really make any difference to the plans that advertisers should have been making. While the way forward inside chrome-based environments might alter as the intent of Google and implications for both consumers and advertisers become clearer, there is no reason to change the pathway the industry was on.

Advertisers should still be striving to understand where both their own marketing use cases and partner vendors have third-party cookie dependencies.

All actors in the market need to recognise that there’s no “silver bullet” and that a blend of UIDs, publisher first-party data, AI-derived audiences, and contextual targeting will all have a part to play in the ecosystem. But we should all have solved that already, as the UK is now 60% cookie-free in open web environments.

How does the industry balance the need for personalised advertising with the growing consumer demand for privacy and control over their personal data?

The industry needs to accept that adherence to consumer privacy demands is non-negotiable, but also recognise that there are many existing effective signals and targeting techniques that will continue to drive media efficiency and effectiveness.

From both a regulatory and technical standpoint, we know what the boundaries of compliance and delivery are, so the industry simply has to work within them.

We know that the solutions we have put in place since 2019 at Teads deliver parity in measurement benchmarks when compared to cookie-based activation. Hence, there’s no reason why the balance cannot be struck.

Can you elaborate on the alternative technologies and methodologies Teads is exploring or implementing to replace cookies for tracking and user data collection?

We broadly separate our solutions into two areas: contextual targeting, for out-stream video and display, as well as CTV, and audiences developed through Teads AI for targeting specific attributes.

Both deliver strong outcomes, and we’re now in a position where we deliver around 80% of our partners’ investments in the UK without the use of a cookie. 90% of the segments in our standard catalogue are already cookie-free. Where there’s more precision needed, we make Teads AI available through the Cookieless Translator feature inside Teads Ad Manager, our end-to-end omnichannel platform.

These techniques won’t change with Google’s revised position, and they’ll continue to deliver parity or better when compared to cookie-based targeting. Of course, advertisers will want to use them – why would a brand only want to talk with the, at best, 40% of the UK audience that you can target with a cookie?

What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for the advertising industry, in light of the recent update from Google? How are Teads positioning themselves in the marketplace?

The biggest challenge is going to be ensuring that people don’t think that because Google isn't deprecating cookies “everything is OK and stays the same as it has always been”. All parties need to recognise that whatever Google does, we’re in a position where only 40%, at best, of open web impressions in the UK are targetable with a cookie.

If 100% of investments chase 40% of a market, there will inevitably be a price distortion. So, while we should be really happy to stop talking about “cookieless” and just talk about targeting, we need to ensure all parties understand that to drive media efficiency and effectiveness through targeting we’re going to have to use a variety of technical solutions.

Any activity where we have been used to a 1:1 connection is still going to be affected. Whilst cookies won’t necessarily be deprecated as we all might have thought, a much lower level of identity is going to be available than back in, say, 2020. That will affect things like frequency capping, retargeting and sequencing.

Similarly, it will affect measurement capabilities. As an industry, we are going to need to become much more comfortable with measurement techniques that model out from “known” samples rather than being able to see an entire research universe on a 1:1 basis. But then, as an industry, we’ve made big investment decisions in linear TV based upon BARB insights for years and that’s about 16,000 people in 7,000 households. If we’re comfortable with that as an industry, then I think we’re going to be OK with the solutions that will emerge for digital media.