 Hello, welcome back to the cookie conundrum and recipe for success, an industry conference and summit from Quantcast on the demise of third-party cookies. We've got a great industry panel here to break it down. Chris Gunther, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Programmatic at News Corp. Chris, thanks for coming on. Zhao Lin, Managing Director Solutions at Zaxis and Somar Simpson, Vice President and Product at Quantcast. Stellar panel, looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So Chris, we'll start with you at News Corp. Obviously a major publisher, deprecation of third-party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance you guys had on them and what are you going to do to prepare for this next level change? Sure, I mean, I think like everyone in this industry, there's a sniffing reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting, but obviously there reliance that third-party cookies pervasive across the whole at-tech ecosystem, martech stack. And so we have to think about how that impact our vendor, the vendors we work with, what it means in terms of our use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So without a doubt, it's significant, but we look at it as, listen, it's disruptive and disruption and change is always a little scary, but overall it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that our perspective is that the cookies as we all know was, it was a crutch, right? Sort of a technology being used in a way it shouldn't. And so as we look at what's going to happen, presumably after Jan 2022, then it's a good way to kind of fix some bad practices, practices that led to data leakage, practice sort of devalue for our perspective. So we offer it as publishers. And I think that this is, and a key thing is that we're not just looking to, as we look through post-Jan world, not just kind of recreating the prior world, because the prior world was flawed, or I guess I could say the current world, since it hasn't changed yet, but the current world is flawed. Let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that third-party cookie goes away, other work around like fingerprinting, things like that also go away. So philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you look at sort of what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world? Obviously, one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Obviously, are we aligned with the regulatory environments? In some ways, we're not looking just to Jan 2022, but Jan 2023 where there's going to be the majority of our audiences we cover by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering, to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a sort of a consistent look at our users, whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components, across all our sites, and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress, but we're excited about what's going on. I like how you framed it, old world or next-gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind-blowing in what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that. Cause I think that original content view is certainly relevant. It's a huge investment and you got great content and audience consuming it. Sal, from a major media standpoint, get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their, their message out in front of the audience at the right time at the right place in the right context, right? So yeah, privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. You know, everyone, everyone has a megaphone now. Everyone's, you know, everyone's here. Everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? You know, if the cookie list future was a TikTok dance, we'll be dancing right now, and at least into the next year. This has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time. But I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. The end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. So clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead, to educate, to partner and to grow with them along this cookie list future. The impact will be all-encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top. Planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. We're on the channel, so clients want to drive outcomes through multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether that's programmatic, whether that's a cookie-free environment like connected TV, digital at home, audio, gaming and so forth. So we're gonna see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing, creative insights. Creative in itself is cookie-less, so there will be more focus on how to drive brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting, with less cookies. With the cohesiveness of holistic planning, creative can align through multiple channels. And lastly, the role of AI will become increasingly important. We've always looked to build our tech, our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and tech stack to deliver these outcomes for them. And AI in its core is just taking input data and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be DSP data beyond cookies, such as browser, such as location, such as contextual or publisher, taking clients' first-party data, first-party CRM data, like store visitation, sale, site activity. And using that to optimize in real-time, regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. So as we're learning more about this cookie-less dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content in real-time, great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and the tech VP of product at Quantcast, get the keys to the kingdom over there. And it's interesting, journalism's about truth and good content, original content. But now you have a data challenge, problem, opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. This is a data problem in a way, it's a tech stack. Not so much just getting the right ads to show up at the right place at the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? So first, I think that consumers already accept that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. And that's a critical piece for us to all understand. Over the past, oh my God, probably two years, since even before the GDPR, we've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. And so we've kind of known this cookie going away thing has been coming. And Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it. And it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. From the marketer perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, it's not just about delivering ads. It's about how do I control frequency? How do I measure success? Because the technology has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, advertising good content to consumers and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too intrusive. On the publisher perspective side, we see a slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right? We're taking back control. We're going to stop the data leakage. We're going to get the value back for our inventory. And both things are a good thing, but if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, in terms of them coming together, right? And that's the critical piece is that they have to come together. They have to get closer. You've got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? Yeah, it's a fascinating, I love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because if you look at how data has impacted these big structural changes and refactoring of industries, look at cybersecurity, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share, they get more insight, more machine learning benefit, more AI benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter, the big guys. They want to wall garden. They want to hoard all the data and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So Chris and Homer, you're in the wheelhouse. You've got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there a sharing model coming as with privacy and these kinds of services, is the open come back again? How do you guys see this, the confluence of open versus walled gardens because you need the data to make machine learning good? So I'll start off. I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created. And I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients? What are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be, I'd say as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism, but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPIs and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that, it is the sort of three core pillar set. It's ease of access. It's the scope of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think as us as an individual publisher, so we have multiple publications, so we do have scale, but then in partnership with other publishers, perhaps to organizations like pre-bid, I think we can, we're trying to address that. And I think we can offer something that's compelling and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, I want to make sure it's clear that transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data. And I think the form of, I think we've all heard a lot of data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wares. And I think there's something valuable, but I think it's the right, who is sort of the right partner or partners. And ultimately, who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side? And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant way. Summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in virality and across multiple omnichannels, as I pointed out, it's happening. That's the distribution now. So that's almost an open garden model. So it's like... Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, back in the day, you know, Knight Ritter, who is the first group that I worked for, you know, each of those individual properties were not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right? And got a scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are gonna have to come together and work together to compare in size to the to the walled gardens. And yeah, this is something that we've talked about before of an open garden. I think that's definitely the right route to take. And I agree with Chris. It's about publishers getting as close to the market as possible, working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy-centric way. Zau, how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third-party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of, it's going to be okay, the parachute will open. The future is not going to be as grim. It's a real opportunity, but if managed properly, what's your take on this? Is it just more first-party data strategy? And what's your assessment of this? So we're collaborating right now with all brands on how to distill very complex cookie-less future, what's gonna happen in the future, to six steps that we can take right now and market should take. The first step is gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie-free environments so you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temporal or time analysis. We could look at log-level data. We could look at site analytics data. We could look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign's success. The second thing we can look at is geo-targeting strategies. The geo-targeting strategy has been underrated because the granularity in geo-data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example, the census block data. And this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data, but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. We wanna optimize investments around markets that are working, so strong markets, and then test in underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie-free. We could build on small-scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories-based sets, working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data, to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. The fourth one is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first-party data and conducting RFIs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The fifth thing, and I think this is very important, is first-party data. That's gonna matter more than ever in the cookie list future. Brands will need to think about how to access and develop their first-party data, starting with the consumer seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a goldmine in understanding your consumer, their intent, their journey. And you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first-party data into a cleaner environment for targeting, for modeling, for insights. And lastly, the sixth thing that we can do is begin informed prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie lists. One place that we can start and it is under-invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been cookie lists for quite some time. So you can start here and begin testing here. Work with your data scientist team to understand the right mixes to target and start exploring other channels outside of just programmatic cookies, like CTV, dig it out of home, radio, gaming, and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to prepare and plan for the cookie list future. So Chris, let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie list future? I think the one certain answer is there definitely is not just one solution. As we all know right now, there seems to be endless solutions. A lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W3C, work happening within other industry bodies, private company solutions being offered. And it's a little bit, it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it, to understand it, understand the impact. And as a publisher, we're obviously, a lot of people are knocking on our door. They're saying, hey, our solution's one that it's going to bring in lots of money. All the buy sides are going to use it. This is the one, like unlock all the spend. And so our experience so far is that none of these solutions are, because I think everyone's still testing and learning. No one on the buy side from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publishers is actually something Summer mentioned before. It's about control. If we're going to work with a, again, outside of our sort of internal identifier work that we're doing, if we're going to work with an outside party or an outside approach, does it give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage. It's privacy compliant. What information gets shared out there? What is it, what's released within the bid stream? If it is something that's attached to someone, a declared user, a registered user, that if that then is not somehow amplified or leveraged off on another site in a way that is leveraging bid stream data or fingerprinting and going against, I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world. And so those controls are critical. And I think to have those controls as publisher, we have to be collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we sort of, we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when that adoption point arrives, it definitely will not be one. There will be multiple, because there's just too many use cases to address. Great insight there from you guys at News Corp. Summer, let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation, ups and downs. We're on a new one now. We talked about the open internet and democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality, people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community, and data is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists? Reward journalism, is there a way, is there a path forward? So there's what I hope is going to happen. And then I'm just going to ignore what could, right? There's a trend in market right now and a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning in to wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on BIPOC owned and operated, really leaning into supporting those businesses that have been, and those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. We are leaning into helping marketers curate that supply and really speak with their dollars about the things that they support and value in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and give people the information that they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. That's awesome. Chris, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel, on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary. Each of you, if you don't mind, just giving a quick soundbite or bumper sticker of what we can expect if you had to throw a prediction for what's going to happen in the next 24 months. Chris, we'll start with you. It's going to be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if Google delays the change to the Chrome by a couple of months and may give the industry so much needed time, but no one knows. I guess, I guess, except for someone somewhere we are deep within Chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly. And it's going to cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of, you know, from advertising marketing. So just be prepared. Okay. Is that all? Yeah, along those same lines, be prepared. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. You know, we're all dancing in this together. I think for us, it's planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. So Omnichannel, AI, Creative. And I think clients will lean more into those different channels. Awesome. So take us home. Last word. I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage, right? So this is a time of discovery, of leaning and trying everything out, learning and iterating as fast as we possibly can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. I can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Selma, thanks for coming on Zao. Chris, thanks for coming on this awesome panel. Industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum, the recipe for success, data, AI, open the futures here. It's coming. It's coming fast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.