(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies, The Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe for Success. We're here with Peter Day, the CTO, Quantcast and Shruti Koparkar, Head of Product Marketing Quancast. Thanks for coming on. Talk about the changing advertising landscape. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we've been hearing the story out to the big players, want to keep the data, make that centralized, control all the leverage, and then you've got the other end. You've got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. What's 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 Quancast strategy to adapt to third-party cookies going away? What's going to be the answer? >> Yeah, so very rightly said, John. The mission, the Quancast mission is to champion of free and open internet. And with that in mind, our approach to this a 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, we are same thing with Prebid, 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 FLoC. The second sort of thing is interoperability. As you've mentioned that a lots of different ID solutions that are emerging. You have UID 2.0, you have LiveRamp, you have Google's FLoC, and there will be more, there are more, and they 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 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 we are, or where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who Quancast 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 interests. 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, their real time. And those incomplete in information isolation, just one of these signals can not help you build up 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 know, you have Peter here >> Yeah. who is the expert so you can dive much deeper into it. >> So Peter is CTO. 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 and a third-party cookieless 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 death knell is really Google Chrome, making the changes that, they're going to be making. So we've been embarrassing in this space for many years and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investments. So one of them is in how to, as a marketer how do I tell it my marketing still working in a world without (indistinct). The majority of marketers, completely relying on third party cookies today. It's tell them if their marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques, which are closer to kind of echo metric models that marketers are used to have things like out of home advertising. It's going to be establishing whether their advertising is working or not in a digital environment. And actually this as with often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement is often mistaken precision for accuracy and there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you'd 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 tied together third party cookies. So I could, if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made I think it would be here till midnight, but we've had to make a number of investments over a number years. And that level 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 it is, unfortunately when I think this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, Hey trust us this page is about SUV's, it's a what's possible now. And it's 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, that 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 for the last few years. And, but we've been using contextual signals since our inception. Had 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 are happening in academia and in kind of an adjacent areas >> On the AI and 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 we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business. Insights into who their audience was, which was using Machine Learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been Machine Learning from before it was cool. A lot of our, kind of a lot of our co-teams have backgrounds in Machine Learning, and the 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, you know, in advertising we have everyone knows and that world that you got the contextual and behavioral dynamics. The behavior that's kind of generally can 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 want to be locked in. They don't want to get walled into a walled garden. Nobody wants to be in a wall garden. They want to be free to pop around and visit sites. It's 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 >> Yeah. 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, you know, every publisher, right? We're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world. All the way through to my mom's blog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of the publishers at every scale. And they consistently tell us the same thing. Which is they want some 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, you know, our job as a company is to really provide level the playing field a little bit. Provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let, 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 recent years have been really 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, is really high quality content as it is on Facebook. And so we've invested a lot of our R&D 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 all 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 these kind of walled gardens. >> Yeah. The direct to consumer, direct to audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for that's happening in these new world? How do you ingest the content, ingest this consent signaling? >> We were really fortunate to have an amazing an amazing R&D team. And, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you know, to realize our vision. This has meant things like we, you know we have crawlers which stand 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 that they can understand how their audiences overlap with potentially their competitors or 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 it with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that is compelling and then 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 that data and easy friendly and users to be able to opt out. And as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted 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, 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 there. Shruti last word for you. What's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform. What's what are you guys seeing as the 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, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is you guys are at least putting forth a solution and 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, you know, our fundamental value proposition which is that the Quantcast platform was never built to be reliant on third party data, these stale segments. Like we operate 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 served with some of the biggest publishers but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across over a hundred million plus web and mobile destinations. And, you know, as you must've heard like 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, you know, 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 it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, a 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 Quancast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies and what's next The Cookie Conundrum, the Recipe for success with Quancast I'm John Berger with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> 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. I really appreciate it. I know you're busy. You've 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 the cube conversation here as part of the program. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. >> So, the house of 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 you know, we've seen this movie before. Web, now mobile revolution. Which was basically a re-platforming 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 are your, 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, you know, I really view the identity proposals in kind of two kinds 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. And as part of the Privacy Sandbox, they've had a number of proposals. Unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say, they're all bird-themed, for some reason I don't know why. But the one, the bird-themed proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called FLOC, 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 and tracking purposes. And so, that's on one side of the equation. It's what Google is doing with FLOC and Privacy Sandbox. Now, on the other side is, you know, 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, you know, Google with FLOC 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 different type of approaches to identity in the future. Again, on the Google side it's cohort level, it's going to 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 them at a group level so that you're protecting privacy. Whereas, on the other side with the open internet you're still getting down to the user level and that's pretty powerful but the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw was 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. >> So we have a publishing business. We'd love to have people authenticate and get that closed loop journalism thing going on. But, if businesses wannna get this level too, they can have concerns. So, I guess my question is, what's the trade-off? Because you have power in Google and the huge data set that they command. They command a lot of leverage with that. And again, centralized. And you've got open. But it seems to me that the world is moving more towards decentralization, not centralization. Do you agree with that? And does that have any impact to this? Because, you want to harness the data, so it rewards people with the most data. In this case, the powerful. But the world's going decentralized, where there needs to be a new way for data to be accessed and leveraged by anyone. >> Yeah. John, it's a great point. And I think we're at kind of a crossroads, right? To answer that question. You know, I think what we're hearing a lot right now in the space from publishers, like yourself, is that there's an interesting opportunity right now for them, right? To actually have some more control and say about the future of their own business. If you think about the last, let's say 10, 15, 20 years in advertising in digital, right? Programmatic has really become kind of the primary mechanism for revenue for a lot of these publishers. Right? And so programmatic is a super important part of their business. But, with everything that's happening here with identity now, a lot of these publishers are kind of taking a look in the mirror and thinking about, "Okay, we have an interesting opportunity here to make a decision." And, the decision, the trade off to your question is, Do we continue? Right? Do we put up the login wall? The registration wall, right? Collect that data. And then what do we do with that data? Right? So it's kind of a two-fold process here. Two-step process that they have to make a decision on. First of all, do we hamper the user experience by putting up a registration wall? Will we lose consumers if we do that? Do we create some friction in the process that's not necessary. And if we do, right? We're taking a hit already potentially, to what end? Right? And, I think that's the really interesting question, is to what end? But, what we're starting to see is publishers are saying you know what? Programmatic revenue is super important to us. And so, you know, path one might be: Hey, let's give them this data. Right? Let's give them the authenticated information, the data that we collect. Because if we do, we can continue on with the path that our business has been on. Right? Which is generating this awesome kind of programmatic revenue. Now, alternatively we're starting to see some publishers say hold up. If we say no, if we say: "Hey, we're going to authenticate but we're not going to share the data." Right? Some of the publishers actually view programmatic as almost like the programmatic industrial complex, right? That's almost taken a piece of their business in the last 10, 15, 20 years. Whereas, back in the day, they were selling directly and making all the revenue for themselves, right? And so, some of these publishers are starting to say: You know what? We're not going to play nice with FLOC and Unified ID. And we're going to kind of take some of this back. And what that means in the short term for them, is maybe sacrificing programmatic revenue. But their bet is long-term, maybe some of that money will come back to them direct. Now, that'll probably only be the premium pubs, right? The ones that really feel like they have that leverage and that runway to do something like that. And even so, you know, I'm of the opinion that if certain publishers kind of peel away and do that, that's probably not great for the bigger picture. Even though it might be good for their business. But, you know, let's see what happens. To each business their own >> Yeah. I think the trade-off of monetization and user experience has always been there. Now, more than ever, people want truth. They want trust. And I think the trust factor is huge. And if you're a publisher, you wannna have your audience be instrumental. And I think the big players have sucked out of the audience from the publishers for years. And that's well-documented. People talk about that all the time. I guess the question, it really comes down to is, 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 and my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open. Which one's going to be better? >> Yeah. That's a great question, John. So as I mentioned, right? We have two kinds of work streams here. We've got the walled garden work stream being led by Google and their work around FLOC. And then we've got the open internet, right? 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, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks. Neither of them are perfect. They're both flawed in their own ways. There are 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, you know, 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 a Google and we go to FLOC 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 going to 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 going to be- You can't ignore the big guys on this Obviously 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 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 going to have new mechanisms." Right? So cookies are going away. Device IDs are going away. And now we've got to 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? 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 going to 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 going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future? So, everyone's talking about it and we're tryna re-engineer 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 going to 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 going to do it will be different. Right now it's FLOC and Unified ID and this and that, right? The ways, the mechanisms will be a little bit different. But, the end state. Right? The actual way in which we operate as an industry and 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 going to 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 going to do in the future. My viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >> And then I'll say the user base is the audience, their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and AI are going to create those. And if you have the data, you're either 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 Leavey School of business in 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 Cookie Conundrum This is theCUBE host, John Furrier, me. Thanks for watching. (uplifting electronic music)