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Brands, It’s Time To Test Those Alt IDs

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So what’s the sitch on signal loss?

Ever since Google decided not to deprecate third-party browser cookies on Chrome, “there’s less immediate urgency” to test alternative identity solutions, says Sisi Zhang, chief data and analytics officer at Publicis-owned Razorfish, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.

But that lack of urgency doesn’t mean agency efforts to address signal loss have stalled, Zhang says. It just means agencies have more breathing room to think carefully and be strategic, because signal loss isn’t just a third-party cookie thing.

“Even without Google’s announcement, there’s still a lot of [data] degradation across the entire digital ecosystem,” Zhang says.

For example, more US states are passing data privacy protection laws, and regulators are pressuring online advertising platforms to restrict data collection – especially children’s data and sensitive data, such as health and financial information.

Over the past few years, agencies and advertisers have been spending a lot of time testing alternative identifiers, according to Zhang. But with dozens of alt IDs on the market, there’s a ton of fragmentation and not a lot of scale.

With time now on their side, she says, marketers should be testing which alt IDs work best for specific advertising solutions or use cases. Alt ID providers, meanwhile, should use the next few months to develop differentiated capabilities to stand out in the marketplace.

Also in this episode: The evolution of clean rooms and how they can coexist in federated data ecosystems.

For more articles featuring Sisi Zhang, click here.

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