 Welcome back to the Quantcast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. The changing landscape of advertising is here and Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital is joining us. Shiv, thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate it. I know you're busy, you got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry. You got some kids to take care of and train them too. So welcome to theCUBE conversation here as part of the program. Yeah, thanks for having me, excited to be here. So obviously the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big three, four tech players dominate the marketplace. So clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before, web, now mobile revolution, which was basically a replatforming of capabilities, but now we're in an era of refactoring the industry, not replatforming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What's your take on this? There's industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue. What does it mean and what proposals are out there? Yeah, so I really view the identity proposals and kind of two kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by Google, right? So Google introduced something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies. And as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals. Unfortunately, however you wanna say it, they're all bird themed for some reason. I don't know why, but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is Google is moving forward with cohort level, learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation. It's what Google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox. Now, on the other side is, things like Unified ID 2.0 or the work that ID5 is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level, right? And so again, Unified ID 2.0 comes to mind because it's the one that's probably gotten the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it. And Unified ID 2.0 again is user level. So it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams, right? You've got the walled gardens and or Google with flock on one side and then you've got Unified ID 2.0 and other ID frameworks for the open internet on the other side. You've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again, on the Google side, it's cohort level. It's gonna be built into Chrome. The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy. Whereas on the other side of the open internet, you're still getting down to the user level and that's pretty powerful but the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under 5% of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you simplify things and you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think the consensus is, at least from my reporting in my view is that the world agrees, let's make it open. Which one's gonna be better? Yeah, that's a great question, John. So as I mentioned, we have two kind of work streams here. We've got the walled garden work stream being led by Google and their work around Flock and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say Unified ID 2.0 kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an end game here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly. I think that, first of all, you have those two frameworks. Neither of them are perfect. They're both flawed in their own ways. They're pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution, right? So they're saying, hey, we use an open ID framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data. And that's important, but we don't have all the scale. So now we go to a Google and we go to Flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh, and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data. We have some of our own partnerships. We're gonna bring that in and layer it on top, right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both with a little extra, you know, something on top. I think that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. What do you think the industry will evolve to in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this as the program that you mentioned also, the data's there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this conundrum? So I think, John, where we're headed, you know, I think we're right now, we're having this existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry because our world is being turned upside down. All the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told that we're gonna have new mechanisms, so cookies are going away, device IDs are going away, and now we gotta come up with new things. And so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and we're here talking about it, like everyone's always talking about identity, right? Now, where do I think this is going? If I was to look into my crystal ball, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today, forget about all the changes, just think about it now and maybe a few years before today. Identity for marketers, in my opinion, has been a little bit of a checkbox activity, right? It's been, hey, okay, you know, ad tech company or media company, do you have an identity solution, okay? Tell me a little bit more about it, okay? Sounds good, that sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you gonna drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know, yes, you have it, okay, great, let's move on type of thing, right? And so that's kind of where we've been. Now, all of a sudden the cookies are going away, the device IDs are going away, and so the world is turning upside down. We're in this crisis of how are we gonna keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future? So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re-engineer, right? The mechanisms. Now, if I was to look into the crystal ball, right? Two or three years from now, where I think we're headed is not much is gonna change. And what I mean by that, John, is I think that marketers will still go to companies and say, do you have an ID solution? Okay, tell me more about it, okay? Let me understand a little bit better, okay? You do it this way, sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are gonna do it will be different, right? Now it's flock and unified ID and this and that, right? The ways, the mechanisms will be a little bit different, but the end state, right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape, in my opinion, will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a, tell me you have an ID solution, make me feel good about it, help me check the box, and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're gonna solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're gonna do in the future. My view point is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. And I'll say the user base is the audience, their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and AI are gonna create those, and if you have the data you have to sharing it or using it, that's what we're finding. Shiv Gupta, great insights. Dropping some nice gems here, founder of U of Digital and also the adjunct professor of programmatic advertising at Levy School of Business and Santa Clara University. Professor, thank you for coming and dropping the gems here and insight, thank you. Thanks a lot for having me, John, really appreciate it. Thanks for watching. The Cooking Hunterman is the CUBE host, John Furrier-Me. Thanks for watching.