What you need to know:

• Poultry giant Baiada has publicly revealed one of the first advertising campaigns carried out using ID5 post-cookie identity technology, seeing a 16 per cent boost compared to standard cookie ads and a 19x uplift in engagement in cookieless Safari.
• Carried out with Havas Media, the campaign aimed to drive tens of thousands of people to the Cooking with Lily website.
• Baiada Head of Marketing, Yash Gandhi, questioned why there are so few examples in market of test and learn with solutions like ID5. “Why is it taking a chicken brand to kick off on this?” he said.
• Havas’ Data Solutions and AdTech lead, Kevin Fernandes, claimed it was a first for the agency. He said Baiada is putting its test and learn budget to good use, unlocking audiences on Safari that have been hard to reach – and are currently a bit cheaper than Chrome equivalents.
• They plan to keep testing ahead of the deprecation of cookies, currently slated for 2024.  

Rooster booster

Chicken giant Baiada has carried out some of the first public tests of post-cookie audience targeting technology ‘ID5’ in Australia, recording 19 times higher engagement in the Apple-owned Safari browser in a three-week campaign for its premium Lilydale brand.

Working with its agency, Havas Media, Baiada Poultry’s Head of Marketing, Yash Gandhi, tested a display campaign to drive consumers to its Cooking with Lily website because he genuinely didn’t see any trials out there to learn from. It relied on the company’s first-party data of Lilydale’s web audiences, matched to premium publishers that are using or trialling ID5, including News Corp's The Australian, The Daily Mail and Australia's Best Recipes. 

It was the first campaign Havas had bought using ID5, the agency’s Data Solutions and AdTech lead Kevin Fernandes said, using a slice of Baiada’s test and learn budget. Gandhi wouldn’t confirm how much, but said it was “significant”.

“We’re not an e-commerce business. This is what surprised both Kevin and I,” Gandhi said.

“Why is it taking a chicken brand to kick off on this and lead the way on this? Why is there no e-commerce brand, where this is their bread and butter and they’re reliant on the e-commerce platforms, to deliver this. Why aren’t they doing it? For us it was more, how do we lead the way on this?”

ID5 is one of the more widespread tech solutions that aims to allow online targeting of ads after third-party cookies in Google’s Chrome browser are removed. These third-party cookies, pieces of code that can save key information about a user’s online behaviour, were initially due to be removed from Chrome at the beginning of 2022. That was then delayed until 2023. They were recently pushed back until 2024. They may be pushed back again.

The ID5 ID uses just about any information it can get from a user – browser type, browser settings, device information, mobile identifiers, geo-location, page URLs, IP addresses and email addresses, for example – as well as a machine learning algorithm to recognise connect users to advertising. 

Safari blocked third party cookies in 2020, as have other browsers like Firefox. But Chrome holds a 53 per cent market share in Australia, while Safari, the second-biggest browser, has a 29 per cent share.

Chicken run

Across the campaign, which compared a three-week period in late May to behaviour in April and early May, there was a 16 per cent uplift in user engagement compared to a standard, cookie-based buy. Reach was improved by 5.35 per cent by adding Safari and Firefox. The campaign drove more than 45,000 people to the Cooking with Lily website, which is a key community hub users reach through QR codes in Out of Home ads and on Lilydale packaging.

ID5 went in the wrapper (the overall structure or frame of a website) of the Cooking with Lily site, and Havas worked with Pubmatic, a supply-side platform, and MediaMath, a demand-side platform, to decrypt the ID5 identities. The campaign was managed through Converged, Havas Media’s audience management platform.

“That was not as simple as just turning on a button,” Fernandes said.

“The great thing about it for us was trying to reach consumers in environments where third-party cookies are blocked as well, like Safari… When you're talking about Lilydale and the brand as an entity in the category, they're competing for advertising space and share of voice in an already clustered market. And that to us was a good way of trying to ensure that we are making these quick wins by making smart, informed decisions.”

Fifteen per cent of Australian publishers have added ID5 to their sell-side programmatic systems, "which is one of the biggest identity providers being parsed in the bid requests right now", Fernandes added.

“The beauty of that is once they've clicked through, we've captured their identity. We know who they are, we know what they've gone on to search for, and therefore better targeting the next time around,” Gandhi said.

Spitting feathers

But, reiterated Gandhi, the market remains strangely muted about the success different brands are seeing with post-cookie alternatives like ID5 – which is one of the big three alternatives in market alongside The Trade Desk's Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp's RampID.

“Why the hell is no one else talking about this and what are the other brands doing? It makes me nervous…Not worrying about what our competitors doing. But just as an industry, I'd love to get some perspective on what people are trialling, testing to go, ‘actually, this works really well for us, or this didn't work and it was a complete shambles’. So we know how we can help improve our own marketing effectiveness…

“Both Kev and I have been to quite a few of the industry events where everyone's doing the talking. Everyone's going, ‘oh cookieless world and cookie crumbles’ and all that shit. Great, no problem. What are we actually doing about it?”