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What Does SSAI Life Look Like Without Cookies?

Learn more about ad tech at Streaming Media East.

See complete videos and other highlights from Streaming Media West Connect on Streaming Media's YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this video:

Nadine Krefetz: How do you track or target when you need to get people's approval for PPI?

Yazmin Wickham: To your first question, how does life look like without cookies? It's very bleak, but therein lies the rub, right? You have to ask for the PPI in order to be able to really track somebody and serve them appropriate ads across devices. So if you can't do that, you're just kind of shooting an arrow in the dark. Generally, the consensus idea seems to be that, if you can get somebody to give you permission to drop that advertising tracking cookie, or to provide you an email address that you can then anonymize, then you can use that with your ad tracking and carry it across everywhere they're consuming content. Without that, I'm not quite sure. I'd love to hear what the other guys have to say about that too.

Larry Allen: I think it's why you're seeing this rush for almost all the media companies to move to B2C, where they're building a direct relationship with consumers. And so then they have an ability to do that linkage and build a household graph across their footprint, and partnering with other platforms that also have direct consumer relationships. In our business, we have 25 million subscribers, we have the ability to match to those households across device types. So that's in our set-top box environment, but also within the apps that run on our platforms and apps that run on other people's platforms. So that is a really important thing. And I think media companies are all actively building their own graphs., and trying to drive more consumer relationships where they're capturing email, home address, credit card, et cetera.

Nadine Krefetz: Jeremy, both of you come from an environment with a lot of data.

Jeremy Brown: In a cookie-less environment, I'm already there because of the server-side. So if you think about how a cookie is created, it's a direct request from a client to a service and that service could be anyone on the ad service ecosystem. When you put SSAI in the middle, you've created almost a firewall between that transaction. It gets a bit murky when we talk about impressions and everything else, but the way we've built out our stack is where we're working closely with manufacturers on the resettable identifier technologies that they have as a replacement. This is part of where GDPR went. And so when you think of Apple IDFA, Roku's ADID, Android AAID, X-Box MSID, these platforms--there's your acronym soup. These are guys who have put the effort in to be compliant with those standards. And so if you just lean on their technologies, and they're resettable identifier, then you know you're following through. Obviously, there's your own user data and program and how that works, but the word "cookie" is not even really a thing anymore for us.

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