 Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and CEO of Quantcast here to kick off the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies. The event's called The Cookie Conundrum, a recipe for success, the changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation, especially now more than ever. Conrad, welcome to your own program, kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Analytics is always the prize of any data-driven company, media, anything's all data-driven now. Talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege, as I mentioned in my open. We've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see, everyone's present online now. Clay Scherke wrote a book called Here Comes Everyone in 2005. Well, everyone's here, right? So, you know, we're here. It's got to be more open, but yet people are looking at it as closed right now. You're seeing the big players, hoarding the data. What's your vision of this open internet? Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time, really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in, and could find an audience. And of course, that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising. And there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open internet. And some of those are under siege today, certainly. And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control of the data? Is it just that these vault gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is it monetization driving it? Where's the friction? Well, the challenge is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of it's going to independent content creators. They're actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenge is that as more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants, the funding path for the open internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. Everyone knows the more data you have, the better and certainly, but the centralized power, when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is, everyone wants to be decentralized, more truth, more trust. All of this is being talked about on the heels of the Google's news around, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. What does this mean? I mean, cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is it going to be replaced with? What is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? Sure. Well, just as advertising funds, the open internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around the identification of, for example, a consumer. Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising, for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically, they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually Apple Safari browser, but Google's Chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that Chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie that it really sort of focused the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big companies like Facebook and Google started bringing all this data in, kind of pulls all, sucks all the oxygen out of the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now being, getting rid of by Google? How does it impact publishers? Because is it helpful? I mean, hurtful? I mean, where's the, where's the, what's the publisher impact? Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the, sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of, you know, the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used. I think for different publishers, it may mean different things, but you know, many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevance. I think the big question, of course, is how are we going to measure it, that any of this is effective at all? Because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. You know, you mentioned contextual, that's come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks and the internet, around the internet, around this topic of machine learning is a big one too. What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies. Okay, cookies, old technology, but the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it are not. It funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is it shared systems? What's the modernization of that? It's all of those and more. There's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So, you will start to see more registration walls to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identifier. There will be statistical models, so-called probabilistic models. Contextual has always been important. It'll become more important and it will be combined with, we use contextual, combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think that there's going to be a whole set of different innovations that we'll need to interoperate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to sort of satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. You know, you brought up walled gardens. I want to just touch on this kind of concept of walled gardens and compare and contrast that with the demand for community. Open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects, mostly in distinct user communities or sub-nets, sub-networks if you will, kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the users the product, as they say, Facebook's a great example, right? People talk about Facebook and from that misinformation abuse to walled gardens, not the best thing happening right now in the world but yet is there any other choice? That's how they're going to make money but yet everyone wants trust, truth, community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving? What's your take? Well, I think the open internet is a forum where anyone can have their voice, put their voice out there and have it discovered and in that regard, it's a force for good. Look, I think there are challenges obviously in terms of some of the optimization that takes place within side the walled gardens which is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. And obviously that's something that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society but sort of at a more pointed level it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open internet which sounds great except for it's increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so our job at Quantcast as champions of the free and open internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environments they care about and delivering advertising results. Yeah, as a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them if we could get the data. We want that data. And then also broker in the monetization with advertisers who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of automation and role of data. This is a huge thing of having that data closed loop if you will for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche, and even as they can become super large they don't have all the data and the more data the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that we need to connect to get to that future state? So I think it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured and why. And I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audiences the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. You know I want to, as we wind down this kickoff segment get your thoughts and vision around the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at Quantcast as well documented. But everyone used to talk about traffic. By traffic then it became cost of acquisitions, PPC search, this is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time then your connections. But audiences is about traffic, audience traffic. If everyone's online, doesn't it become about networks and the people? So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important and people agree that it is and things are going to be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard, you need addressability. The formation of networks and groups becomes super important. What's your vision on that? So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think this one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfills the objectives that publishers and marketers have. Everyone wins when advertising is more relevant and our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future people around the world have access to high quality diverse content. If someone asks you Conrad, what is Quantcast doing to make the open internet viable? Now that cookies are going away, what's the answer? So well, the cookie piece is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning, activation and measurement post cookies. And we have a lot of innovation going on there. We're also working with a range of industry bodies and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today in buying the wall gardens. The reason the wall gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results. Marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishers, the open internet. You know, our job at Quantcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. Great stuff, great mission Conrad. Thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldman, founder and CEO here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies. Thank you Conrad, appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more on the industry event around demise of cookies.