5 Minutes with Rob Norman and John Donahue

Evolve or die. That was the message that John Donahue, partner at programmatic consultancy Up and to the Right, imparted when The Current spoke with him earlier this year amid the beginning of Google’s Chrome web browser cookie deprecation.

Now despite Google reversing its plan completely, Donahue’s sentiment remains even more relevant, as marketers and publishers are reportedly keeping their foot on the pedal, moving still toward a cookieless future.

In a moment of rapid evolution throughout our industry, we spoke with Donahue and Rob Norman, former CEO of GroupM North America and fellow digital marketing veteran, to get more insight into this “future state” we’re moving toward and what ripple effects — if any — will come from Google’s latest decision.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

John, back in March, you told us that “we’re at this great precipice of ‘evolve or die.’” Now that we've seen this latest move from Google, how do you look back at that statement?

John Donahue: I think it still holds. The reality is that Safari is still not allowing, especially on the iPhone, prevalent cookie data. So with them being a dominant function in the phone market in conjunction with mobile impressions being overdelivering, you're losing out on a huge percentage of the available inventory that's there.

So even though the Google announcement pushes that Google is not going to deprecate the third-party cookie — and seems to indicate they’re going to look for a bit more forward consent or tracking permission from the users as implicit within Chrome — [that] still doesn’t change the fact that the majority of connected TV’s impressions, the majority of mobile app’s and the majority of mobile web’s, where the traffic is, is not being enriched by the third-party cookie.

So it puts us in a position where the “evolve or die” statement still leads, because it does enable you at the majority being there it’s going to cause that same sort of one minus the majority as a numerator on the current average price of media.

Rob, if you were a marketer today, how would you build your strategy using all of the different kinds of fractured and fragmented signals that we have to deal with?

Rob Norman: Evolving means going from a current state to a future state. This one's interesting because evolving is going to be a back-to-the-future state, because advertisers always looked for leading indicators of intent. They've looked for pieces of information that suggest to them when and in what time frame people are likely to choose between two different things, make decisions and so forth.

And they have always used those to assemble audiences that they want to reach, to build campaigns at the right level of reach, frequency and recency to provoke those actions. And that's what they've done and that's what they're going to do again. So, they're going to look to other signals outside of the narrowly defined individual identifier in order to build that presence and their activity.

I think that what Google is doing is they’re playing catch-up a bit with Apple, [with a similar positioning as] ATT [App Tracking Transparency]. I think in doing that, they probably stave off the attention of the regulator a little bit. And we’ll see a sort of slow and lumbering process toward the same inevitable outcome that we would have had [even if] they deprecated the cookie completely.

What do you make of those comparisons to Apple?

Norman: There’s a couple of aspects to it that are interesting. There’s a very contained user experience within the Apple ecosystem. People open one of the 50 or so apps that they use habitually. They have the consent choice within the app [and] they make their decision.

I think the Chrome browser experience is different. People have different kind of relationship with [the] myriad websites than they do with a select number of preferred apps in their ecosystems. People are going to see consent notices, I suspect, over and over again in the same way that you do if you experience European websites.

It’ll be interesting to see if consumers’ sort of default behavior is to [select] “ask not to track.” And of course, it depends on how the question is asked or whether, as has happened in some other markets, people turn out not to be all that bothered. I think we’re in a little bit of a “wait and see” moment to see how that shakes out, because Google hasn’t really given us much insight into the eventual user experience. And without knowing what that is, it’s quite hard to predict what the consumer response will be. The Apple one is kind of very easy to understand and immensely predictable.

What are the moves that are going to happen next?

Donahue: We know that something is coming that might not be as flexible as third-party cookies [and] might not be as forward and clear, to Rob’s point, on user experience…But there is a clear signal that there will be something coming.

The cookie wasn’t really good at managing households, and it wasn’t even good at managing devices. We had to use Identity Alliance and 17 different ways to figure out how to reach a user once acknowledging that they have seven different devices. I think all these things will continue to progress, but it’s all pretty speculative until we see what that privacy czar at Google plans to do.

I think the savvy advertiser is thinking to themselves, “How do I find new ways to get audiences? How do I find new targeting tactics that are a little bit less ‘weeble wobble’ and that definitely work for me? How do I find ways to expand audiences based on insights I can garner from the first-party data?” And that may mean not using first-party data as a literal addressable seed and just doing lookalikes from it, but using it to further integrate.

So, I think it’s going to continue to cause people to evolve in how they’re thinking about reaching the right and relevant audience from a purchaser perspective or prospective-purchaser perspective.

Is there anything in this overall topic that you think is missing from the conversation or not getting enough airtime?

Norman: Within the narrow holes of the ad tech [community], X community and LinkedIn community, the initial reaction was “What are we going to talk about at conferences? Now we can’t talk about cookie deprecation?” But I think that the real truth of it is that what we’re already talking about and what we will carry on talking about is about individual identity deprecation as opposed to cookie deprecation.

And the conversation will bifurcate in two directions. It’ll be, one: To what degree can we expect to use individual identifiers in the future? To what degree will they be valuable even if we can use them? And if we can’t use them or shouldn’t use them, what are the other signals that we can activate in the bidstream? My guess is a slow shift away from individual identifiers despite the non-announcement about cookie deprecation and a circular shift toward other indicators intent on looking at activating those data streams in the bidstream.