(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to the Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe For Success an industry conference and summit from Quancast on the demise of third-party cookies. We've got a great industry panel here to break it down. Chris Guenther, senior vice president global head of Programmatic at News Corp. Chris, thanks for coming on. Xiao Lin, managing director solutions at Xaxis, and Somer Simpson, vice president of product at Quancast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Chris, we'll start with you at News Corp obviously major publisher. Deprecation of third-party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance you guys had on them. And what are you going to do to prepare for this next level change? >> Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there is a, you know, a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot talk about audience targeting, but obviously they realize that third party cookies pervasive across the whole ad tech ecosystem, MarTech stack. And so, you know, we have to think about, you know how that impact, you know, our vendor the vendors we work with, what it means in terms of our use cases across marketing, across advertising across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it's significant. But you know, we look at it as listen. It's disruptive in disruption and change is always a little scary, but overall it's a it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the the cookies, as we all know, is it was a crutch, right? It's sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. And so, as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022, then it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data, leakage, practice sort of devalued for our perspective. Some of the, you know, we offered as, as publishers. And I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look through post gen world, not just kind of recreating the prior world. Because the prior world was flawed or I guess I could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just replicate that. You know, let's make sure that third party cookies goes away other work around like fingerprinting and things like that, you know, also go away. So, you know, philosophically that's where our head's at. And so, you know, as we look at how we are preparing you look at sort of what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? You know, obviously are we aligned with the regulatory environments? You know, in some ways we're not looking just to Jan 2022 but Jan 2023, where there's going to be the majority of our audiences, we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering, to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a a consistent look at our user is whether they're logged in or obviously, anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components, across all our sites, and all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress but you know, we're excited about what's going on. >> I like how you framed it, you know, old world or next gen kind of the current situation is kind of flawed. And as you think about Programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant. It's a huge investment, and you've got great content and audience consuming it. Xiao, from a major media standpoint get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right? So yeah, privacy, you got consent and all of these things kind of boiling up how do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. You know, everyone, everyone has a megaphone now everyone's you know, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >> You know, if the cookieless future was a tik tok dance, we'd be dancing right now and at least until the next year. This has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time. But I think as each day passes the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. The end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of Programmatic. So clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead, to educate, to partner, and to grow with them along this cookieless future. The impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top. Planning will have a huge impact because it's going to start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. We're omni-channel. So clients wants to drive outcomes through multiple touch points of a consumer's journey. Whether that's programmatic, whether that's as a cookie free environment like connected TV, out of home, audio, gaming, and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with Creative testing, Creative insights, you know, Creative in itself is cookieless. So there will be more focus on how to drive a brand dialogue, to connect to consumers with less targeting, with less cookies. With the cohesiveness of holistic planning, Creative can align through multiple channels. And lastly, the role of AI will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech, our products, to compliment new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and tech stack to deliver these outcomes for them. And AI in its core is just taking inputted data and having an output of your desired outcomes. So input data could be DSP data beyond cookies such as browser, such as location, such as contextual, a publisher taking client's first party data, first party CRM data like store visitation sales site activity. And using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. So as we're learning more about this cookieless dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it, and also introducing our own moves. >> That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, you know connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somer, with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at Quancast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting, journalism is about truth you know, good content, original content. But now you have a data challenge, problem, opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. This is a data problem in a way. It's a tech stack, not so much just, you know getting the right ads to show up at the right place, the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >> You know, I, so first I think that consumers already sort of accept that there is a reasonable value exchange, you know, for their data, in order to access free content. Right? And that's a critical piece for us to all kind of understand. Over the past. Yeah, probably two years, since even before the GDPR, we've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. And so, you know, we kind of known this this cookie going away thing is, has been coming and you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it. And it's been really really interesting since Google's announcement how the conversations have changed with our customers and other folks that we talk to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. From the marketer perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, Oh my God, how you know, it's not just about delivering ads. It's about how do I control frequency? How do I measure, you know, success? You know, because the technology has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, you know, advertising good content to consumers and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too, too intrusive. On the publisher perspective side, we see a slightly different response. It's more of a yes. Right? You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage. We're going to get the value back for our inventory. Both things are a good thing. But if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night. Right? In terms of, you know, them coming together. Right? And that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer. You got to cut out a lot of like that LUMAscape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >> Yeah. It's a fascinating, I love your insight there. I think it's so relevant. And it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data is impacting some of these big structural changes and refactoring of industries look at cybersecurity, you know no one wants to share their data but now if they share, they get more insight more machine learning, benefit, more AI benefit. So now we have the sharing notion but that goes against counter the big guys that want a walled garden. They want to hoard all the data and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So Chris and Homer, in the wheelhouse you've got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming? with privacy and these kinds of services is the open come back again? How do you guys see this? The confluence of open versus walled gardens. Because you need the data to make machine learning good. >> I'll start off. I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens I've created. And I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients? What are we offering to the buy-side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be, obviously, as journalists I think that there is a case of, you know the importance of funding journalism. But ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the the KPIs and the business needs of the buy-side. And I think around that, it is, you know there's sort of three core pillars to that. It's ease of access, it's scope of activation and targeting, and finally, measurable results. So as I think, as us, as an individual publisher of so we have multiple publications so we do have scale, but then in partnership with other publishers perhaps organizations like Prebid, you know I think we can, we're trying to address that. And I think we can offer something that's compelling and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear that transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data. And I I think we've all heard about like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wares. And I think there's something valuable, but you know I think it's who is sort of the right partner or partners, and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting shared for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant way. >> Somer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization. The network effect that we're seeing in virality and across multiple omni-channels as Xiao pointed out, it's happening. That's the distribution now. So that's almost an open garden model. So it's like >> Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's, you know back in the day, you know, Nightrider who was the first group that I, that I worked for, you know each of those individual properties were not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective. but together as a unit, they became valuable. Right. And got a scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the walled gardens. And yeah, this is something that we've talked about before, an open garden. I think that's the definitely the right route to take. And I agree with Chris. It's about publishers getting as close to the marketers as possible, working with the tech companies that enable them to do that, and doing so in a very privacy centric way. >> Xiao how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third-party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's going to be okay, the parachute will open. The future is not going to be as grim. It's a real opportunity, but if managed properly. What's your take on this? Is it just more first party data strategy? And what's your assessment of this? >> So we're collaborating right now with ball grants on how to distill very complex cookieless future you know, what's going to happen in the future. To six steps that we can take right now and marketers should take. The first step is gather Intel on what's working on your current campaign analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temporal or time analysis. We can look at log level data. We can look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how Creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo-targeting strategies. The geo-targeting strategy has been underrated because the granularity and DL data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example, the census block data. And this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data, but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. We want to optimize investments around markets that are working, so strong markets, and then test in underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. We could build on small-scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets, working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data, to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. The fourth one is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFIs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and your future roadmap. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The fifth thing, and I think this is very important, is first party data. That's going to matter more than ever in the cookieless future. Brands will need to think about how to access and develop the first party data starting with the consumer, seeing of value in exchange for the information it's a goldmine and understanding your consumer their intent, their journey. And you need a really great data sciences team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a clean room environment for targeting, for modeling, for insights. And lastly, the sixth thing that we can do is begin inform prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookieless. One, one place that we can start, and it is under invested right now, is Safari and Firefox. They have been cookieless for quite some time. So you can start here and begin testing here. Work with your data scientist team to understand the right mixes to target and start exploring other channels outside of just programmatic cookies. Like CTV, digit auto home, radio, gaming, and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to prepare and plan for the cookieless future. >> So, Chris, let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookieless future? >> I think the one certain answer is there definitely is not just one solution. As we all know right now, there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals when the W3C, work happening within other industry bodies, you know, private company solutions being offered. And you know, it's a little bit, it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand it and understand the impact. And as a publisher, we're obviously, you know, a lot of people are knocking on our door, you know they're saying, hey, our solution is one that it's going to bring in lots of money. You know, all the buy-side is going to use it. This is the one like unlock all the spend. And it's our experience so far is that none of these solutions are, cause I think everyone's still testing and learning. No one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise I think what matters the most to us as publishers, actually something Somer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a, you know, again outside of our sort of independent internal identifier work that we're doing, if we're going to work with an outside party or an outside approach, does it give us control >> As a publisher to ensure that it is, you know we control the, the data from our users, you know there isn't that data leakage, it's privacy compliant. You know, what information gets shared out there? What is it what's released within, you know within the bitstream? If it is something that's attached to a, someone, a declared user, a registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off in another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going again. And so I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world. And so those controls are critical. And I think to have those controls as publisher we have to be collectively be disciplined. And you know, what solutions that we sort of we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when that adoption point arrives it definitely will not be one. There will be multiple because there's just too many cases to address. >> Great, great insight there from you guys at News Corp. Somer, let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation, ups and downs. We're on a new one now. We talked about the open internet and democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now but there's now a wave of quality people, really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and data is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists to reward journalism? Is there a way, is there a path forward? >> So there's what I hope is going to happen. And then I'm just going to ignore what could, right. You know, there's a trend in market right now at a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning in to wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on BiPAC owned and operated, really leaning into supporting those businesses that have been and those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. We are leaning into helping marketers curate that supply, right. And, and really, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that they support and value in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues. And it's not just sort of like a marketing blip but we will do everything possible to kind of encourage that behavior and give people the information that they need to find. You know, truly high quality journalism. >> That's awesome. Chris, Xiao, Somer, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookieless future. Before we go, just quick summary, each of you if you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction for what's going to happen in the next 24 months. Chris, we'll start with you. >> It's going to be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if Google delays the change to the Chrome by a couple months. And may give the industry some much needed time. But no one knows, I guess, I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere, we are deep within Chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes that happen, changes that happen quickly. And it's going to cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of, you know, from advertising and marketing. So just be prepared. >> Okay. Xiao. Along those same lines, be prepared. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. You know, we're all dancing in this together. I think for us, it's planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. So omni-channel, AI, Creative, and I think clients will lean more into those different channels. >> Awesome. Somer, take us home. Last words. >> I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage, right? So this is a time of discovery of leaning and trying everything out learning and iterating as fast as we possibly can. >> Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. I can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Somer, thanks for coming on. Xiao, Chris, thanks for coming on this awesome panel industry breakdown of the Cookie Conundrum, a Recipe for Success data AI open the future is here. It's coming. It's coming fast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.