What you need to know:

• Programmatic media company MiQ is running 60 per cent of its Australian buys without cookies, instead relying on a network of other identifiers, LiveRamp and SimilarWeb partnerships, a growing audience panel, and clients’ first party data.
• The firm is looking at reaching 100 per cent cookieless so there won’t be any changes when Google deprecates cookie in the second half of next year.
• Reaching 100 per cent means reducing cookiereliant media, like performance display ads. MiQ is focusing on what it calls ‘advanced TV’, digital out of home, and YouTube.

Programmatic firm MiQ is running 60 per cent of its Australian media without cookies and is eyeing 100 per cent, pushing first party data, authenticated identifiers, digital out of home and television.

The death of third-party cookies is now scheduled for the second half of 2023, but MiQ didn’t want to lose the momentum it built when they were slated to deprecate by March 2022, Jason Scott, the company’s newly promoted APAC region CEO, said.

“The eventual removal of cookies won’t impact our ability to perform for our clients,” he said.

“It’s activation, running campaign strategies that use authenticated identifiers, it’s measurement, testing in different privacy sandboxes. It’s a lot of stuff you’ve got to get after to make sure you’re future proofed.”

The company is touting an ‘identity spine’, which connects the market’s different identifiers, as well as a partnership with SimilarWeb. It is also building an audience panel – initially with 7,000 people, but that will grow to 15,000 – with a heavy focus on ‘advanced TV’, or connected TV, and is working with clients to onboard their first party data to use in programmatic buys. First party data can then become a LiveRamp Ramp ID, an emerging alternative to cookies. The mix of media MiQ is looking at is also changing as a result.

“Campaigns that don't run in browsers are largely unaffected by the loss of cookies. We run vast amounts of Advanced Television, leveraging our real time content feeds from smart TVs and our MiQ Audience Panel, neither of which have cookie dependencies,” Scott said.

“We similarly run substantial volumes of DOOH where geo data and creative are core product features.” Beyond that, they’re looking at YouTube and postcode-level brand campaigns with brand uplift studies.

“At the end of the day, the world is changing fast and many of the old dependencies are thankfully becoming less important for us,” Scott said.

Performance display is the most difficult to eliminate entirely. Clean room technology, which allows two different parties to merge data sets for insights without sharing raw data with each other, is one growing option, and modelling is another.

The company’s progress weaning itself off third party cookies is a metric it tracks by time and market.

“I have access to a live dashboard,” Scott says. “I can see cookieless by market, by top 10 advertisers, and I can see what the US or UK is doing. I can cut it all different ways.”

In Q2 so far, Australia is at 60 per cent cookieless. In the US, it’s a little over 53 per cent.

“It changes the conversation a bit, when you’re able to be pretty articulate about where you’re at,” he said. “What are you doing? That’s the whole point, there are tonnes of narratives, but you need to be getting ready for it.”

Since taking over the company in Australia in late 2019, Scott has grown MiQ to 50 people around most of the country’s state capitals. In his new role, he’ll control most of MiQ’s APAC region, excluding India and China.

“It’s obvious. Cookies are destined to depart – that decision is in the hands of others, in terms of market control. We’ve always had the view that when decisions were made that pushed cookieless out again, prolonged their retirement, we’d already been investing for two years,” he said.

“You can argue over a bottle of wine whether it was a good decision. You don’t want to lose momentum. We talk to clients about that. We had been making significant investments.”