 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, or 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. It's 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. Yeah, everyone knows the more data you have, the better and certainly, but the centralized power, when the trend is going the other way that 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 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 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, as 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, you know, 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 gonna be a whole set of different innovations that we'll need to interoperate and it's gonna 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 subnetworks, 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 gonna 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 at a more pointed level is 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 to 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, you know, buy traffic and it became cost of acquisitions, PPC search, this is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time and you know, 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 walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they've 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 of 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 and 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. 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. As part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals. Unfortunately or 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, 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 is 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 Waldgarten work stream being led by Google and their work around Flock and then we've got the open internet. 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 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 be, you can't ignore the big guys on this. As the programmatic 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, hey, we're gonna have new mechanisms, right? 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, you know, we're here talking about it, right? 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, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today, right? 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, 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 Hunters, this is theCUBE host John Furrier-Me, thanks for watching. Hello, welcome back to The Cooking Hunters, a 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 Cooking Hunters. 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 talk about audience targeting, but obviously that relies on third-party cookies, pervasive across the whole ad tech ecosystem, martech stack. And so, we have to think about how that impact, our 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 in 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, 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, some of the, we offered as publishers. And I think that this is, and a key thing is that we're not just looking to, as we look through a post-Jan world, not just kind of recreating the prior world, because the prior world was flawed, where 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 finger printing and 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. So 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 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 and all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone has a megaphone now, 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, you're at the keys to the kingdom over there. And it's interesting, journalism is 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 sort of 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 slightly different response. It's more of a yes, we're taking back control and 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 pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer. You've got to cut out a lot of like 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 Summer, you're in the wheelhouse, you've got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there a sharing model coming is 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 at 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, there's sort of three core pillars to that. 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 and we do have scale, but then in partnership with other publishers, perhaps through organizations like Pre-Bed, 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, 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 walled gardens. And yeah, this is something that we've talked about before, 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 marketers as possible, working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy-centric way. Zao, 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. 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'll collaborate 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 marketers should take. The first step is gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the datasets 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 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 roadmap. 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-less 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 gold mine in understanding your consumer, their intent, their journey. And you need a really great data sciences 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-less. One place that we can start, and it is under-invested right now, is Safari and Firefox. They have been cookie-less 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, digit 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-less 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-less 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 enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it, to understand it and 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. They all, the buy side's 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 Stummer mentioned before. It's about control. If we're going to work with a, again, outside of our 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 that 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 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 journalism, to reward journalism as 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? You know, 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, right? 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, all dancing and 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 cooking conundrum, the recipe for success, data, AI, open, the future's here. It's coming, it's coming fast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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. And 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's 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 REARC. Same thing with Previd, 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 WhoConCust 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, it's GTO, 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. You know, 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's still working in a 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 two years, but 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, 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 you got the contextual and 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 as 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 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 ad 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 the recent years have been really to 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 that environment as really high quality content as it is on Facebook. And so we've invested a lot of RRD 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 the kind of wall garden. Yeah, the direct, the direct to consumer, direct to audience is a new trend you're seeing 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 and D team. And, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, to realize our vision. This has meant things like 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 their competitors or their 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 their 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 adept in 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.