Rachel Cascisa, VP Platform Adoption Epsilon has been in ad tech for roughly 20 years. She knows thing were good, and are about to dramatically change.
“We built an industry around third party cookies,” she said. “They were easy, and ended up being very lucrative for us.”
The hope is that things continue to be lucrative, and ideally more equitable going forward. Even as cookies are set to disappear next year, Cascisa sees a big opportunity for a healthy reset – one that should reorient the balance of power away from walled gardens like Google and Facebook toward a much larger swath of the publishing world.
But that will require new investment and new targeting technology that balances effectiveness and privacy.
“We have an opportunity to rebuild our ecosystem probably in the way we should have in the beginning,” she told Beet.TV.People based marketing is what is ultimately going to drive this industry forward….companies that can recognize and reach people on the open web are going to excel in the coming years.”
Of course, the way companies ‘recognize’ people online has to stay on the right side of regulators – and customers. “Consumers are a lot more mature and informed now,” she said. That’s why she believes education be crucial. Some of the headlines surrounding ad targeting are “scary for the average consumer.”
“We need to help them understand the tradeoffs in our business.”
