If you thought Apple’s privacy controls for users posed a challenge to advertisers identifying consumers, wait until Google finally gets around to deprecating cookies.

Google may have delayed its switch-off for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome until 2023.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Yieldmo’s CEO Mike Yavonditte says the erosion of targetability presents a problem that must be addressed.

Missing address

“Right now, only about half of all inventory is addressable using a cookie … merely half of all adults,” Yavonditte says.

“A lot of the people that use iPhones, for instance, are not in that target set. They tend to be among the most coveted from a demographic standpoint, yet most, most marketers can’t reach them.”

He says that will get worse when Google switches off cookies. “Addressability will go from 50-50 to about 20%,” he adds. “Brands and agencies and advertisers are going to have to start testing and experimenting with other types of systems.”

After cookies

Yavonditte says potential alternatives include privacy compliance systems and alternative identifiers.

The industry has been racing to plug the addressability gap left by the wave of pro-privacy measures, with a plethora of candidates more diverse than traditional cookies.

Yavonditte’s own company, Yieldmo, which powers an ad marketplace, thinks it has a unique take.

It has a supply-side platform (SSP) technology with an opinion.

The data difference

“Most SSPs do not do not provide targeting and optimization because most of their customers come with their own form of targeting, but we decided to invest in it,” Yavonditte says.

“We spent about $25 million in the last six years, just on the infrastructure required to collect trillions and trillions of the data events every month.

“We take the entire open web… We collect a bunch of information that a lot of other companies like motor IAS or DV360 collect but we also collect dozens and dozens of different kinds of events, every 200 milliseconds, that we believe no one else in the world collects.

“All that data gets organised in very interesting ways, and then gets fed into machine learning models that best correlate to the KPIs of all advertisers that spend money in this marketplace.”

Performance and growth

Yavonditte hopes that tech will help Yieldmo build self-service tools that can increase advertiser performance by 80% to 100%.

The company has been hiring hard over the last year and recently announced integration with LiveRamps Authenticated Traffic Solution.

The company raised a further $2 million in Series C money in mid-2020.

You’re watching “Diversifying Spend: Buying Beyond Audiences” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Yieldmo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews