When Google reversed its decision to deprecate third-party cookies, the first word in ID5 CEO Mathieu Roche’s mind was an expletive.
But it doesn’t really matter what happens with cookies on Chrome anymore.
“Most of the industry has moved past the notion that cookies were good enough to target and measure advertising on the web,” Roche says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
But some still lean on cookies like the crutch they are, he says, even though match rates are low, cross-device tracking is unreliable and privacy restrictions are increasing.
“In French, you have a saying: ‘Like a Band-Aid on a wooden leg,’” Roche says. “It doesn’t cure the patient, for sure, but it feels like it’s an answer – a very bad answer.”
In other words, what’s the point of stitching together digital identity using fragmented signals that don’t accurately represent user behavior?
People engage with the world in complex ways, constantly switching between apps, browsers, devices and locations. So identity can’t be static either, Roche says. It needs to adapt to the moment while also respecting a user’s privacy choices.
But you can’t do that by relying on third-party cookies, which is why ID5 has been investing in machine learning technology to connect consented signals and generate persistent universal IDs.
“We need to adapt to evolving legal and technical circumstances … and we need to do that in real time about 7 billion times a day every day,” Roche says. “No static methods of recognizing users will scale to that level.”
Also in this episode: Whether probabilistic is “better” than deterministic (whatever “better” means), balancing scale and precision in algorithmic recognition and Roche’s favorite cookie (as in the kind you can eat).
For more articles featuring Mathieu Roche, click here.
