Publishers need a lot of things.
They need to collect more first-party data; they need their readers to authenticate; they need reliable, consent-based information to maximize their ad revenue.
Easier said than done.
The majority of people don’t subscribe and log into publisher sites; they hit a paywall and immediately bounce elsewhere with a click and an eye roll.
Meanwhile, social referral traffic is way down and direct search traffic is on the decline.
During a breakfast meeting on Thursday in Cannes, a source of mine rather casually told me he believes websites as we know them won’t even exist in around five years – or maybe sooner. Later in the day, a different source predicted that websites will simply become repositories of information created not for humans to visit but for AI companies to greedily consume as meals to feed their models.
But publishers have more power than they think to authenticate their audiences, said Will Doherty, The Trade Desk’s SVP of inventory development, during a panel in Cannes earlier in the week.
They’ve just gotta learn how to wield it.
Voilà, addressability
What can media brands do to survive?
What they should’ve been doing all along, which is to focus on building a sustainable, one-to-one relationship with their readers, creating the sort of content worth signing in for and making it easy and low-friction to authenticate.
“If you make it a long, Byzantine process of prompt after prompt after prompt,” Doherty said, “they’re going to abandon.”
This is hardly a surprising perspective coming from an executive at the company that developed Unified ID 2.0. The Trade Desk has a vested interest in promoting UID2 as a privacy-conscious alternative to traditional online tracking methods, and it’s been actively courting publishers since the initative launched around five years ago.
But TTD is also realistic. Maintaining addressability takes a village.
According to Doherty, if a publisher can manage to achieve a 30% authentication rate among its readers – or even 20% will do – it’ll have enough of a deterministic base to layer in additional probabilistic solutions and extrapolate the rest of its audience.
C’est bon.
None of that is worth a damn in the long term, though, unless publishers and their partners strike a respectful balance between preserving addressability and maintaining privacy.
It should be a handshake, not a head fake.
“I hope we’re getting to the point where the industry is doing that,” said Julie Rooney, OpenX’s chief privacy officer, “We need to have a more nuanced, actually productive conversation on these things.”
🙏 Thanks for reading! And regards from a coffee shop in Cannes. This post was fueled by three double espressos. As always, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with any comments or feedback. But don’t expect an immediate response, because this will be me in a few hours.
