SANTA MONICA, CA – Google last week moved ahead with its long-running plan to get rid of user-tracking cookies from its popular Chrome web browser. The limited test to restrict cookies for 1% of Chrome users is another reminder that advertisers need accurate audience identifiers to improve their targeting – especially as television becomes more digitized.
“Identity has long been one of those things that has not been interrogated enough,” Travis Scoles, senior vice president of advanced advertising at Paramount, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams at the Beet Retreat Santa Monica.
“One of the things that’s really exciting right now about identity is for the first time…we’re starting to ask a lot of hard questions like: Is this identity information accurate? Are these ads going to the households we think they’re going to?” Scoles said.
Media companies and advertisers currently rely on a variety of data models to plan campaigns and to analyze how well they reached audiences frequently enough.
“The most important thing to remember is that anytime you’re dealing with a model, that means that it’s not 100% accurate,” Scoles said, “and understanding that accuracy rate is going to become an incredibly important part of the future here.”
Identity is especially important with cross-platform campaigns, especially as traditional media companies become walled gardens that protect their valuable customer data. Without identifiers, advertisers face difficulties in knowing whether they’re reaching the right audiences through traditional linear television, streaming, social media, internet search and retail media networks.
“One of the reasons identity is so important right now is it’s the binder of digital and linear signals – snd more and more people are buying convergently as a default,” Scoles said. “This is where a lot of these new modern solutions – identity, et cetera – these investments are aimed to do that. They’re aimed to chain together the audiences across all of these platforms, so that you still have the one holistic audience you can reach.”
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