How advertisers and publishers are planning for post-cookie advertising

As the era of the third-party cookie internet finally draws to a close, data from DoubleVerify, featured in WARC’s new The Future of Programmatic, hints at what advertisers and publishers believe could replace audience-led advertising. 

Why the post-cookie era matters

The third-party cookie is an imperfect but relatively democratic tracking technology, but it is coming to an end. Where the industry goes next is now up for debate: some techniques will aim to create a widely used but privacy-first ID system; others will look to a webpage’s context, while some will focus on interests, notably Google’s Topics.

This data, recorded in 2023, suggests where the people spending or receiving ad dollars think it will go. Non-subscribers can read a sample of the report here.

The data

• First-party data, consented and held by the data controller, is of prominent interest across both advertisers and publishers.
• Attention measurement, which is seeing more and more research backing the idea, is similarly interesting to both parties.
• There is disparity between publisher and advertiser hopes for Google’s Topics. It suggests that advertisers are more sanguine about a one-stop-shop solution than publishers, for whom even more control over their advertising dollars presents a growing concern.

Sourced from DoubleVerify via WARC