As the end of third-party cookies nears, with Google starting the deprecation early this year, digital publishers too have begun to introduce changes for a new beginning. Some of these changes include building the martech stack, personalisation, and creating customer data platforms (CDP), among others. Yet, there is no doubt that businesses will have to deal with some immediate impacts, thereby leading to a loss in revenue. “The two strategies that publishers can look to manage their first-party data include adopting user-friendly, single-sign-on authentication solutions, such as OpenPass, to gather essential consumer data. This data, shared in a privacy-conscious way, becomes the lifeblood of publishers and preserves the value of advertising impressions. Secondly, publishers can enable advertisers to leverage emerging identity solutions like Unified ID 2.0 to target relevant audiences across the open internet. Through these solutions, advertisers and marketers can track and manage campaigns enabling them to see if a specific audience group has seen an ad and manage the frequency of the ad for the viewers across all the channels. All this without compromising the consumer trust they have spent years, or sometimes decades building,” Tejinder Gill, general manager, The Trade Desk, told BrandWagon Online.
The Indian advertising industry grew 8.6% over 2022 and presently holds a market size of Rs 93,166 crore, as per the latest Dentsu Digital Advertising report. By the end of 2025, it is expected to further grow at a compounded rate of 9.86% to reach Rs 1,12,453 crore. The digital advertising industry witnessed an impressive growth of 36.6% over 2022 with a market size of Rs 40,685 crore, and is estimated to reach Rs 62,045 crore growing at a compounded rate of 23.49% by 2025, the report further stated. Currently, social media dominates digital media spends, accounting for a 30% share (Rs. 11,962 crore), closely followed by online video with 29% and paid search with 23%. According to industry estimates Google, Meta, Amazon account for 80-90% of the digital advertising revenue with the rest remaining with digital publishers.
Publishers and the immediate impact
Even as digital publishers have been in preparation for third-party cookie deprecation to begin, one still cannot deny the fact there will be an immediate impact on revenue, especially that earned through programmatic. “Publishers expect to see a temporary decline of about 30% in programmatic revenue, but that will be recovered in first and second quarters as the buying moves the eventual new standard that emerges. Impact on total revenue will vary for each publisher depending on their direct-sold and programmatic mix, the quality of their first-party data and their ability to use it to improve direct-sold revenues in the interim,” Puneet Gupt, COO, Times Internet, said.
Industry experts called the demise of third-party cookies a Y2K moment for the advertising ecosystem. While everyone is rightfully worried, once implemented completely, people will forget about it in two to three quarters post the cookie-calypse as buying will move to equally effective newer channels for targeting, retargeting and frequency capping, and publishers will start to leverage their first-party data and relationships better. “While revenue drop is a real challenge, the impact will be limited to select parts of the programmatic business. However, with programmatic targeting taking a back seat, it is a good time for publishers to step up and reach out to advertisers with their in-house first-party data solutions and more than fill up the gap left by programmatic business,” Puneet Jain, CEO – HT Digital, the digital arm of HT Media Group, explained.
Meanwhile, it is smaller publishers who could feel the heat for a longer time, largely due to the unavailability of enough funds to invest in creating an ecosystem for first-party data. It is believed that here smaller agencies can play a role. “There are intermediaries and solution providers who are enabling this for the smaller players and creating a means of identifying and targeting users, by bucketing them into segments while managing the privacy and data security concerns,” Sanjay Sindhwani, CEO, Indian Express Online Media said.
Building the stack
Industry experts believe that while digital publishers may look to onboard solution providers to solve a few business problems, yet some of the larger issues will have to be handled within and require investment. It is estimated that the capital expenditure of publishers will increase by five percent in the next six months to one year. For Sindhwani, the investment varies, depending on the size of the publishers’ audience, and the extent of data that is being collected, stored and processed. “However, serving ads is not the only use case for first-party data. It can be used for targeted content delivery and personalisation, it also helps in driving the publisher’s subscription and content commerce revenues more efficiently and effectively, if one has those revenue streams at play,” he noted.
Interestingly, HT Digital, claims to be proactively preparing for this transition for years. “We’ve invested in building a robust Martech stack centred on a robust first-party CDP. This strategic approach has allowed us to spread costs over time, unlike organisations just starting their journey into the cookieless world. For us, it’s about reaping the benefits of our long-term planning. Our CDP-powered martech stack positions us to deliver value to users and advertisers in the cookieless future,” Jain added.
Despite a rise in investment, it is believed that going forward, the first-party data sets packed with privacy will be a key driver of advertising strategy. “Both brands and publishers are working to create and augment their first-party data pools as it is central to advertising in a third-party cookie-free world. Brands are updating their martech stacks by incorporating technologies that focus on privacy-compliant data collection, first-party data management, and alternative tracking methods such as contextual targeting and cohort-based advertising,” Gupt said.
Packing a punch
To be sure, the first-party data world allows publishers to build a rather direct and long-term relationship. At the same time, it allows publishers to maintain the lid of users’ privacy a must in today’s day and age. According to HT Digital’s Jain, publishers are also exploring new technologies such as Google’s privacy sandbox and contextual targeting to maintain advertising effectiveness. “Additionally, diversifying revenue beyond ads, through subscriptions, podcasts, and video content, etc. This multifaceted approach aims to ensure sustainability and growth in an evolving digital landscape,” he added.
For Google, the goal of the Privacy Sandbox is to offer a new approach to digital advertising that improves people’s privacy on Chrome and Android, while keeping content like news sites, mobile apps and more accessible to everyone for free. “Performance campaigns play an important role for marketers in delivering their business goals. The Protected Audience API is built for such performance campaigns. Custom audiences are a very important use case for delivering highly relevant ads. An advertiser will be able to build custom audiences based on users showing a behaviour on said domain, and then be able to re-market to this custom audience without the requirement to track each (individual) user. The Protected Audience API employs many new approaches through Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), to preserve user privacy while supporting this important and complex use case,” Kunal Guha, director, Privacy – Chrome and Android for Asia Pacific at Google, said in an earlier interview to BrandWagon Online.
Meanwhile, embracing contextual targeting that is moving beyond user IDs to unlock new avenues for reaching engaged audiences without compromising privacy, besides transparency and user control and readily accessible opt-out mechanisms that build trust and encourage data sharing, are some of the mechanisms publishers can look at. While the universal identifier landscape remains unsettled, brands can cautiously evaluate privacy-preserving options such as Unified ID 2.0 and Fledge APIs. This can ensure future adaptability and pave the way for potential interoperability solutions. Yet, another step can be to shift focus from cookie-based last-click attribution to holistic customer journey mapping. Engagement metrics, brand lift studies, and sentiment analysis have the potential to paint a richer picture of campaign effectiveness and customer connection. “If publishers can give an appropriate value in exchange for asking users for their details, we have seen that users are happy to share their information. This could be personalised content, access to specific content pieces, quality newsletters, unlocking stuff behind a paywall, invitations to events or membership of a programme, among others,” Gupt noted.
Other steps include enhancing mechanisms for secure, scalable data storage and processing, and ensuring compliance with global data protection laws, in addition to developing content that resonates with individual reader interests, driving engagement and loyalty and integrating advanced analytics tools for deeper insights. “Publishers are swapping creepy trackers for privacy pacts. We’re advising clients to embrace privacy-first martech such as data clean rooms and consent management platforms. Think transparency – give users control over their data and showcase the value they receive in exchange. It’s a shift from hyper-targeting to contextual relevance, focusing on quality content that builds trust and genuine connections with audiences. It’s all about a sustainable, privacy-conscious future where users win back control, and publishers win loyalty – a win-win in the cookie-less era,” Bhavik Mehta, founder and CEO, Thinkin’ Birds Communications, said.
While digital publishers have set out on a new journey in this first-party data world, challenges will be at the heart of it. To begin with, publishers will have to put in enhanced mechanisms for secure, scalable data storage and processing, ensuring compliance with global data protection laws. Moreover, digital publishers will now be required to develop content that resonates with individual reader interests, driving engagement and loyalty. Add to this, integrating advanced analytics tools for deeper insights. Not to mention, identifying key alliance partners for innovative solutions while safeguarding privacy. “The challenge would be that this entire data stack and platform will come at a cost, and unless one has a clear way to monetise this investment, it can backfire and add to the woes of reduced revenues along with increased costs,” Sindhwani said.