 Welcome back to the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here at Peter Day, the CTO of Quantcast and Shruti Kopkar, head of product marketing, Quantcast. Thanks for coming on, talking about the changing advertising landscape. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. So we've been hearing the story, obviously the big players want to keep the data, make that centralized, control all the leverage, then you got the other end, you got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. What are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because if cookies go away, what's going to happen there? How do people track things? You guys are in this business. First question, what is Quantcast strategy to adopt to third-party cookies going away? What's going to be the answer? Yeah, so very rightly said, John. The mission, the Quantcast mission is to champion a free and open internet. And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third-party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. First is industry standards. We think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating with IAB Tech Lab, we've been part of their project Pre-Arc. Same thing with Pre-Bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity, the ID pipes of the future. And then also is W3C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings, trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress there on things such as Google's flock. The second sort of thing is interoperability. As you've mentioned, there are lots of different ID solutions that are emerging. You have UID 2.0, you have LiveRAM, you have Google's flock. And there will be more. There are more and there will continue to be more. We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at. Today our customers use multiple different data management platforms, DMPs. And that's why we support multiple of those. This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who ConCust is, is innovation. As you can imagine, being able to take all of these multiple signals in, including the IDs and the cohorts, but also others like contextual, first party, consent is becoming more and more important. And then there are many other signals, like time, language, geolocation. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior, intent, and interest in absence of third party cookies. However, there's something to note about these. They're very raw, they're complex, they're messy, all of these different signals. They are changing all the time, they're real time. And there's incomplete information isolation, just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior, intent, and interest, and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights or responding to bid requests and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three fundamentals that our approach is grounded in, which is industry standards, interoperability, and innovation. And you have Peter here who is the expert, so he can dive much deeper into it. So Peter, CTO, you've got to tell us, how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data-driven advertising in a third party cookie-less world? Well, we've been, this is not a shock. I think anyone who's been close to this space has known that the third party cookie has been reducing in quality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of desk now is really Google Chrome making the changes that they're going to be making. So we've been investing in this space for many years and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investments. So one of them is in, as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing is still working in the world without third party cookies? The majority of marketers completely rely on third party cookies today to tell them if their marketing's working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily in statistical techniques, which are closer to kind of econometric models that marketers are used to for things like out-of-home advertising, to kind of establishing whether their advertising's working or not in a digital environment. And actually, as is often the case in these kinds of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees, if you like, and start to come up with better methods of measuring the effectiveness of advertising without third party cookies. And we've had to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and targeting that third party cookies and connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of loom escape that's going to tie together third party cookies. So if I would enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'd be here till midnight, but we've had to make a number of investments over a number of years and that level of investments only increasing at the moment. Peter, on that contextual, can you just double-click on that and tell us more? Yeah, I mean, contextual is, unfortunately, one of those things is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this page is about SUVs to, what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build statistical models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consuming. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in areas like natural language processing and really gives computers a kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize the internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last few years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception. It's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviors, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep that investment going and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in adjacent areas. On the AI machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and AI factoring into your platform? I think it's how we've always operated right from our inception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time who were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business, insights into who their audience was, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been machine learning from before it was cool. A lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning, PhDs in statistics and machine learning. And that really drives our decision-making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it. And to do that at this kind of scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. So you mentioned contextual. Also, in advertising, we have everyone knows in that world that you got the contextual behavioral dynamics. The behavior that's kind of generally, everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they don't want to be locked in. They don't want to get walled into a walled garden. Nobody wants to be in a walled garden. They want to be free to pop around and visit sites. There's more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden vertical platforms. So with future of AI, the experience is going to come from this data. So the behaviors out there, how do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? Yeah, I think it's a really good point. And we're definitely at this kind of tipping point we think in the broader industry. I think every publisher, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world all the way through to my mom's vlog. So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. And they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connect to consumers. They don't want to be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content. And in some cases, what content they're allowed to present. And so our job as a company is to really level the playing field a little bit, provide them the same capabilities that they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences and their environments discoverable by marketers, measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of add funded economic model as effective in the open internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in their environment. There's really high quality content as it is on Facebook. And so we've invested a lot of our R&D dollars in making that true. And we're now live with the Quantcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only kind of exaggerate or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just want to build a technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled gardens. Yeah, the direct, the direct to consumer, direct to audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent signaling? I mean, we're really fortunate to have an amazing R&D team. And, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you know, to realize our vision. This has meant things like we, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with presented competitors or the collaborators, but more importantly, organize it for marketers so they can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines which can get answers back in seconds so that, you know, marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to the data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. And we're fortunate enough to have had a large enough R&D budget over the last four or five years to make a number of investments, everything from consent and identity through to contextual signals, through to measurement technologies which really bring advertisers and publishers closer together. Great insight, Shridu, last word for you is what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform? What are you guys seeing as a highlight from a platform perspective? So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. I think one of the things we hear quite a lot is you guys are at least putting forth a solution an action solution for us to test. Peter mentioned measurement that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. So that is where his team has started and we have some measurement, very, very initial capabilities, still in alpha but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. So the initial response has been very encouraging people want to engage with us. Of course, our fundamental value proposition which is that the Quarkus platform was never built to be reliant on third party data, these stale segments. We've always operated on real-time live data. The second thing is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working, like Peter said, with some of the biggest publishers but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. And as you must have heard, that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies. We are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. And so that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and lean into it quite a bit. So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course, it doesn't hurt that we've made all these R&D investments we can talk about consent. And I often say that consent, it sounds simple but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved but there's lots of legal work involved as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response initially. Democratization, everyone's a publisher, everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So congratulations, Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies. And what's next? The Cookie Conundrum, the recipe for success with Quantcast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.