I happen to think trying to cookie someone is going to ultimately be unsuccessful, and as you point out multiple people feel they have a claim on the conversion. My guess is that will simplfy, kick out everyone in the middle except the content site and the advertiser. I can be totally wrong here, but that is my best guess at what will happen.
ok, but in a cookieless world, how do I identify people to target?
The current flow is this:
advertiser pushes 1-party data into an exchange or ad network, either directly or via a dsp or dedicated company ala liveramp or via retargeting partner. This can be as simple as "target this user" or very complex, eg catalog integrations ala tellapart.
With no cookie, how can an exchange or network know that anyone wants to show an ad to this viewer?
The other possibility is a single company sees all / has global ident ala fb and google on mobile.
Also, you keep coming back to multiple parties having a claim on a conversion. That is fundamentally unrelated to cookies. It's this: multiple parties showed an ad to a user. Forget, for now, how that user was identified. If that user then converts, which partners get how much credit?
Publication demographics, backed up by readership surveys. (I know pretty old school but it passes muster even in Germany for privacy protection) Places like TechCrunch survey their readership and identify demographic characteristics that you might want to target. (age, sex, buying habits)
> With no cookie, how can an exchange or network
> know that anyone wants to show an ad to this viewer?
Because they have already made the decision based on the readership, if the publication keeps identity information and demographic information it can share it with the advertisers. Their is no "risk" of showing it because they only pay on conversion, there is only the publication wanting to get better at showing the correct ads.
How that would work in practice, if you have a login with a publication they can share demographics about that login when they ask to get an ad[1], if not they can share general demographics.
> multiple parties showed an ad to a user. Forget,
> for now, how that user was identified. If that
> user then converts, which partners get how much
> credit?
The partner who got brought the customer gets 100% of the credit, everyone else gets 0. For generic items statistics will have that conversion happening randomly amongst all the possible places it is shown. For non-generic items the partner that got the reader to the point of doing the conversion "wins" that particular round.
As you have surmised it does not support the notion of building an ad network through the use of cookie analytics. However I suspect such tracking/monitoring networks are going to be put out of business by a combination of privacy laws and browser changes. They are already considered "bad" by many consumers and transitively by those consumer's representatives in government.
I completely disagree about the death of the cookie. First, most users just don't care much. Second, killing 3rd party cookies is a huge gift to the handful of companies with, eg, single sign on so cross site visibility: fb and google. This was the problem with firefox's proposed ban on 3rd party cookies: I can't think of a bigger gift to give to google and fb. Now you may still support that under the theory that a few companies are easier to regulate than many, but I'm not sure that's a compelling case to regulators. I think the most likely outcome is we get european style cookie regulation, and the majority of sites put a click-dismissed banner on the top saying if you keep reading we get to cookie you. Oh, and if you do just use technical measures to kill 3rd party cookies, google et al can evade that by having pubs cname them into the first party then doing standard cookie stitching.
Disorganized thoughts:
Your ad solution sounds to me like a trip back to advertising 10 years ago -- lots of brand ads / dems targeting. Surveys are pretty crappy; high income dems tend not to respond; people lie; most publishers don't collect regdata; etc. Obviously a handful of pubs -- those used as proxies for rich demographics -- would love this (nyt, ios review sites, bmw/mercedes fan clubs) but for most pubs it would be a loss.
Even with lots of direct response ads there is too much inventory continually driving ad rates down; I don't see how removing a bunch of demand would improve anything from most pubs' perspectives.
Publishers uploading regdata also brings its own privacy problems.
