The data management platform category – and the world around it – has changed a lot since 2006 when Andy Monfried, this week’s AdExchanger Talks guest, founded Lotame.
The company, which turned 18 this year, came of age in an ecosystem replete with cookies and devoid of regulation.
In early 2020, when Google first announced its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome (ahem, we’re still waiting), many predicted that DMPs would flame out or perhaps just fade away like old soldiers.
DMPs aggregate and store data from online and offline third-party sources, including cookies, IP addresses, device IDs and other digital IDs, and many of these signals are getting a lot harder to come by.
But don’t write an elegy for DMPs just yet, Monfried says.
“More than half of what we process has nothing to do with third-party IDs or third-party cookies,” Monfried says. “Third-party cookies are still the connective tissue for a lot of clients, publishers and marketers – but if Google said tomorrow, ‘Turn off your ID,’ we would be in the catbird seat.”
He’s highly skeptical, though, that Google will stick to its new “early 2025” deadline for third-party cookie deprecation, or that the change will be quick when it finally comes.
“What we’ve heard is that [Google] wanted to get through the election and not hurt journalism when a lot of the money pours in,” Monfried says. “I do think it will begin to happen later in ’25, but I don’t think it’s going to be like a light switch.”
Also in this episode: Monfried’s Grateful Dead-inspired business strategy, musings on the Chrome Privacy Sandbox (he’s not a fan) and Lotame’s reinvention of itself as a data collaboration platform. Plus, are web publishers screwed and were we wrong about the value of first-party data?
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