LAS VEGAS – Privacy regulations in many parts of the world has the advertising and marketing industry to seek other ways to track online consumers while also giving them more control of their personal information. Emerging technologies promise to provide these capabilities on the open web, which consists of sites whose main features aren’t locked inside a virtual walled garden.
“People have a lot of different perspectives on what is the open web. The most common view is that it’s open to consumers, as in people can access certain websites without being blocked by a paywall,” Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at Omnicom Group’s OMD Worldwide, said in this interview at CES 2025 with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV.
“It’s also open to advertisers in the sense that inventory is made available through the open federated programmatic ecosystem,” Hovaness said.
The need for alternative ways to track people’s website visits has been magnified with Google’s decision to give users of its popular Chrome browser the ability to opt into being tracked by third-party cookies.
“We know that there’s going to be significant cookie loss this year, and so as a result, we’re now prioritizing our push to get clients to improve signal integrity in their marketing technology ecosystem,” Hovaness said. “That takes a variety of forms including Google Analytics updates, leveraging clean rooms, a variety of other things.”
The loss of tracking cookies has side effects on ad measurement and attribution. A variety of organizations and companies have worked to replace the cookie with a more privacy-safe identifier. Ad-tech company The Trade Desk formed a consortium of publishers, advertisers and agencies to popularize an identifier now known as Unified ID 2.0.
“Omnicom has been a major supporter of the UID2 initiative, and the idea is that with cookies going away, we need new signals to replace it without all the flaws of the cookie,” Hovaness said. “Historically, UID2 adoption has been low, but a lot of that is because cookies have still been around. With cookies going away, it creates a stronger incentive to drive UID2 adoption.”
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