The end of the third-party cookie and the arrival of COVID-19 are twin tornados tearing the roofs off many ad tech houses. But some companies stand to gain. There’s Google, course, and … LiveIntent?
This week on AdExchanger Talks, President Brian Silver makes a case that his company is well positioned to weather the recession of 2020-2021.
Although the coronavirus has decimated brand budgets, Brian says LiveIntent’s balance sheet remains strong and that its primarily direct-response clients are still spending.
“We have a performance-based group of advertisers,” he says. “Our ads being associated with those newsletters has put us in a pretty lucky spot. We are maniacal about looking at which verticals and categories are doing well during this time.”
Historically, LiveIntent is best known as an email ad network, using a tag in publisher newsletters to serve a targeted ad at the time an email is opened. More recently, though, it pivoted toward identity, and Brian says Google’s plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome puts LiveIntent in a strong position to offer addressability via its “first-party” graph.
But isn’t LiveIntent still reliant on the third-party cookie?
“There are elements of third-party cookie syncs that are part of our graph, but it’s certainly not the main part of our graph,” Brian says. “When the third-party cookie gets eliminated, because the cluster is still in the hash – and we have all the IP data and all the other parts that make up our graph – it gives us the ability to utilize just the first-party elements for our future.”
Also in this episode: riding out COVID-19 in the Catskills and Brian’s work on behalf of people with Fragile X Syndrome (of which his son is one).
