When people decline tracking cookies or use already-cookieless browsers, such as Safari and Firefox, it can prevent brands from reaching potential customers who may be interested in seeing their ads.
“Cookie blocking is completely understandable, and I support everybody’s right to make those choices,” said Richard Brandolino, IBM’s global media channels and ad tech lead. “But it limits our ability to communicate with people who wish to communicate with us.”
And forget Chrome and the so-called cookieless future: Nearly 40% of the US internet population already uses a cookieless browser.
In an effort to tackle this addressability challenge, IBM recently ran a test campaign focused on retargeting B2B prospects across Safari and iOS in partnership with MediaMath and alternative identity provider ID5. IBM and MediaMath are longtime partners, but this test was the first time IBM worked with ID5.
Testing an alt ID
The test campaign was part of a larger initiative IBM was running to promote its cloud and AI products to IT professionals.
Reaching B2B buyers has always been difficult, regardless of signal loss, because business professionals like to do their own research, the products they’re considering are expensive, and purchase decisions are generally made by committee.
Getting in front of the right business leader is no easy task. But then again, retargeting anyone in a third-party-cookie-free environment like Safari is no easy task.
IBM placed ads on desktop and mobile sites, including on iOS and Android, and integrated the ID5 ID into product pages on IBM’s website, said Joe Quaglia, VP of sales and business development at ID5.
The purpose was to retarget B2B audiences that had previously visited the IBM site and who signaled interest in IBM products.
When users visited one of the product pages, they were assigned an anonymized ID5 user ID that would then get fed into MediaMath’s DSP where the signal could be picked up by SSPs looking to fill publisher inventory. If those same users later visited one of the thousands of publisher sites with ID5’s ID solution deployed, they would be retargeted with an ad for the IBM products they’d previously looked at.
The retargeted ads – which only appeared on sites IBM has whitelisted – were served programmatically through MediaMath and using IBM’s dynamic creative optimization engine.
Lower CPMs
CPMs for the cookieless audiences IBM was able to reach through this campaign were 21% lower than the average CPMs on Chrome browsers and Android devices.
It’s not uncommon for cookieless browsers to generate lower CPMs than on Chrome because of the perceived lower value of non-addressable audiences. Advertisers are often hesitant to bid on these audiences, even if they can get them at a lower cost.
But through the ID5 integration, IBM was able to retarget 1.4 million unique users it would have missed out on otherwise.
Adding addressability via an alternative ID did add to the cost – cookieless CPMs are usually roughly 50% lower than on Chrome – although IBM did still end up saving money by focusing on Safari.
And the campaign allowed IBM to effectively retarget a hard-to-reach audience.
“The skew for Apple products tends to be higher-income individuals, professionals and other demographics that align with the business leader [and] senior IT executive target audience that IBM has been going after in various ways for 100 years,” Brandolino said.
Better CPMs for cookieless inventory is also good news for publishers, which can have trouble monetizing cookieless audiences.
“If you just compare CPMs in Safari to Chrome, publishers might think this is pulling down performance,” Quaglia said. “But it’s actually introducing more addressable inventory that they’re able to sell, which is a net positive for their business.”
Opt-in or no go
But consent always has to come first – and every party needs to get it.
The ID5 ID was only deployed for users who opted in to seeing personalized ads from IBM, and ID5’s publisher partners also needed to get consent from their visitors.
With consent in place, ID5 is able to do ID reconciliation and create a persistent link between the same user across multiple sites on the open web, Quaglia said.
Users are assigned an anonymized ID as part of the ID reconciliation process that gets packaged into the publisher’s bid request and can then be picked up by DSPs, like MediaMath, for instance.
“Traditionally, we would look for a cookie,” said Jared Lansky, SVP of partnerships at MediaMath. “But when a cookie is not available, we now have the ID5 solution to execute the campaign against and optimize based on its performance.”
While alternative IDs are typically painted as post-third-party-cookie targeting alternatives, they can have a positive impact for publishers and marketers right now, Lansky said.
“Even today, there are incremental, high-value audiences available specifically within iOS that marketers can take advantage of,” he said. “So you’re getting the benefits of planning for the future, but still adding to the bottom line of your campaigns.”
