When will digital advertising graduate from cookies to persistent identifiers?

March 30th, 2010 View Comments

Relevance is the key to winning on the internet. As advertisers, we’re always striving for relevance, but we’re not really competing with each other. Most often we’re competing with the adjacent content. And average click through rates of around 0.05% makes me think we’re not winning the game.

As I move around the internet, I’m seeing amazing increases in relevance. I can sign up for a new web service like Plancast via my Twitter account and OAuth, and have my first site experience informed by information about me and my social graph. I can read e-mails in GMail and have Rapportive pull in data from Rapleaf showing my correspondents’ Flickr account, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn account. When I visit LinkedIn, they apply an uncanny intelligence to my social graph, suggesting “People You May Know” that I either do know or would truly like to meet.

Across the web, new levels of relevance are driven by data that is:

1) Persistant — The data doesn’t get erased, so it continues to get smarter

2) Portable — The data goes everywhere I go

3) Personally Identifiable — The website is speaking to me, Greg Hills, not some approximation of who I am

The data driving these new levels of relevance is organized around user names, email addresses, and other persistent, portable, personal identifiers. It is transferred largely through API’s.

Online advertising data is stuck in the ghetto of cookie based storage. How could a cookie-targeted ad compete with content that’s informed by open API’s? Its like bringing a knife to a gun fight — and their guns are only getting bigger! With the accumulation of time, user data is becoming richer. With the growing pervasiveness of API’s like OAuth and Facebook Connect, the data is becoming more ubiquitous at the same time. Advertising relevance is growing incrementally while the relevance of the content I consume is experiencing hockey stick growth.

When will we move past the cookie?

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  • Author: Greg Hills
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