Ad tech is a world of buzzwords and funny acronyms, but there are also simple words that we use daily that will define our future. With the third-party cookie being deprecated in 2022, Audiences, Behavioral, Cookie, and Data will become some of the most important words we use.

A is for Audience:

A specific group of consumers who are most likely to want a product or service, based on their age, gender, income, geolocation, interests, purchase intention, or other factors. Advertisers seek out the audiences most likely to be receptive to an ad campaign. 

Audiences are at the heart of the trillion-dollar ad tech industry. Audience-based ad buying is not going away, but the industry must adapt to a cookieless future in innovative ways, including by collecting identifiers from users in a way that respects their privacy preferences and evolving regulations. Quantcast Measure, is a leading audience intelligence solution for the open internet. Its live data set on 100M+ web and mobile destinations empowers publishers and marketers to know and grow their audiences

B is for Behavioral

Publishers and advertisers can reach their audiences more effectively based on observations of past web behavior. This is a key tenant of digital advertising, leveraging preferences and predictions to drive ad personalization.

For up-to-the-second understanding of consumer behavior, live data is essential. Ara,™ our AI and machine learning engine, uses machine learning to transform unique, real-time data into behavioral patterns. Ara pairs these patterns with real-time campaign monitoring to surface actionable insights and optimize towards the best outcome for every single ad. 

C is for Cookie:

Information generated by a website and stored by your browser, to help understand users’ online behaviors. First-party cookies are directly created and stored by the website (or domain) when a user visits the site. In contrast, third-party cookies are created by a third-party domain via code loaded on the website, which tracks users and collects their data for the third party. 

Before Google announced its plan to deprecate the third-party cookie from Chrome in 2022, the internet was already moving toward a cookieless future, as people changed how they used the internet: choosing to browse in incognito mode, deleting their cookies, or using Safari or Firefox, where they knew they could avoid cookies since 2017. With 40% of third-party cookies on the internet already gone, marketers have been working to develop a more sustainable and reliable way of reaching audiences. Quantcast chose to forego third-party data, knowing we couldn’t trust it would be there in two years. We built the Quantcast Platform from the ground up to withstand that demise, putting consumer privacy, transparency, and trust at the forefront of our identity solutions

D is for Data:

First-party data is information directly collected from a company’s own source on consumers’ behaviors, actions, or interests, so it’s “owned” by a single source. This can include a brand’s customer database, information about website visits or actions on their website, and other points of engagement collected about that business’s customers or visitors. This data is considered the most valuable. Third-party data is information that a company collects indirectly (such as through third-party cookies) or aggregates from others (such as credit card companies and magazine publishers) and then sells to ad buyers. 

Data is essential to making smarter advertising decisions. By data, we mean huge real-time data streams, observations about the real world that are directly collected and immediately available. The Quantcast Platform is powered by one of the largest real-time data sets on the open internet. As our CTO Peter Day puts it, “The data we have access to is raw, messy, diverse, and noisy–each datapoint by itself is usually completely meaningless, yet without data we are blind!” First-party data (with consumer consent) is a necessary foundation to rival the walled gardens when it comes to understanding, reaching, and influencing audiences.

Interested in Learning More?

We will continue to highlight terms from our new Ad Tech Glossary of Terms in future blog posts, but you can also review the vocabulary on your own, using it as a handy reference tool.