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The adver­tis­ing indus­try has trans­formed enor­mous­ly over the last decade. From the evo­lu­tion of ad servers and booms in ecom­merce and apps, to chang­ing video and pro­gram­mat­ic land­scapes and the grow­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion of offline media chan­nels, the pace of inno­va­tion has nev­er been so fast. And coro­n­avirus has accel­er­at­ed it even fur­ther.

It is the tight­en­ing up of pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tions, how­ev­er, and the end of third-par­ty cook­ies, dri­ven first by Apple in its Safari brows­er and, next year, by Google in its Chrome brows­er, that is hav­ing per­haps the great­est impact. With third-par­ty cook­ies hav­ing been core to the open web’s tar­get­ed offer­ing to adver­tis­ers, pow­er­ing pre­cise ad per­for­mance mea­sure­ment, their demise sig­nals an urgent need for an alter­na­tive.

Find­ing one is cru­cial to ensur­ing the open web can com­pete with the “walled gar­den” plat­forms that seek to dom­i­nate adver­tis­ing spend. Inno­v­a­tive solu­tions are forth­com­ing, for­tu­nate­ly, and com­pe­ti­tion rules are pro­vid­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties for the open web to thrive. Con­scious of the sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of adver­tis­ing spend being accrued by walled gar­dens, adver­tis­ers are mak­ing delib­er­ate moves to bal­ance it with open inter­net play­ers, accord­ing to recent research by Criteo.

“Adver­tis­ers still expect strong out­comes despite the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of what online iden­ti­ty may mean,” says Shruthi Chin­dalur, exec­u­tive man­ag­ing direc­tor, Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa, at Criteo, a glob­al tech firm pow­er­ing brands with trust­ed and impact­ful adver­tis­ing. “While com­pa­nies are tak­ing dif­fer­ent stances, there is a pos­i­tive uni­fi­ca­tion of the indus­try to solve the issues.

“With a sig­nif­i­cant part of their lives now spent online and hav­ing expe­ri­enced plen­ty of ads across many dif­fer­ent plat­forms, con­sumers nowa­days want more inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences. At the same time, they are savvi­er about the con­tent they wish to watch and want to under­stand the trans­paren­cy of smart adver­tis­ing and how much con­trol they have. The real oppor­tu­ni­ty will be in the bal­ance between all this.”

Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly pio­neered cook­ie-based tech­nol­o­gy that helped brands be more tar­get­ed with their adver­tis­ing, Criteo has been through its own trans­for­ma­tion to adapt to the indus­try changes of recent years. It has respond­ed by inno­vat­ing once again to pro­vide tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies’ need to bet­ter know and serve their cus­tomers.

Criteo has adopt­ed new posi­tion­ing with its Com­merce Media Plat­form. It is present at every step of the con­sumer jour­ney, offer­ing brands and adver­tis­ers aware­ness solu­tions such as video and con­nect­ed TV (CTV) cam­paigns based on its unpar­al­leled online and offline com­merce data knowl­edge, or with exclu­sive place­ment on an ecom­merce web­site, for exam­ple. With the largest first-par­ty com­merce data set in the open inter­net, it is deliv­er­ing suc­cess for world-lead­ing brands with­out the need for third-par­ty cook­ies.

The com­pa­ny also launched its Retail Media plat­form last year, giv­ing retail­ers a sin­gle inter­face to grow their busi­ness, and allow­ing brands and agen­cies to invest in new adver­tis­ing space on retail­ers’ web­sites using stan­dard­ised work­flows and met­rics.

Mean­while, Criteo has part­nered with The Trade Desk on the Uni­fied ID 2.0 ini­tia­tive, a con­sor­tium of actors that will col­lec­tive­ly com­pete with the “signed-in envi­ron­ment” of walled gar­dens, and recent­ly shared its plans to inte­grate its sin­gle sign-on solu­tion so con­sumers can have unprece­dent­ed con­trol over their per­son­al data and ad expe­ri­ence.

“We want to empow­er users with more choice, trans­paren­cy and indi­vid­ual con­trol over their data,” says Chin­dalur. “Uni­fied ID 2.0 is the per­fect exam­ple of how our indus­try is resilient and can col­lec­tive­ly work togeth­er to pre­serve the phi­los­o­phy of the open inter­net. Online iden­ti­ty should not be in the hands of any pri­vate com­pa­ny and, not least, with a dom­i­nant gate­keep­er. We believe it should be in the hands of the con­sumer.

“The world is real­is­ing that dig­i­tal gate­keep­ers can be a poten­tial risk for the econ­o­my and our soci­ety. Our unique posi­tion­ing, unpar­al­leled access to first-par­ty com­merce data and pre­mi­um com­merce place­ment put us at the van­guard of mod­ern adver­tis­ing, bal­anc­ing the scales. With user-cen­tric, cohort-based, con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing, we are ulti­mate­ly cre­at­ing a new, safe and open world for brands and retail­ers alike.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it criteo.com

Pro­mot­ed by Criteo