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Alan Chappelle
Welcome to the Monopoly Report. The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. If you are new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Monopoly Market tv, and you can check out all the Monopoly Report podcasts @monopoly report pod.com I'm Alan Chappelle. This week my guest is Eris Levin, a media futurist who spent nearly a decade and a half at Google and is one of a short list of people in this space who is really preaching transparency and ad quality. Aeris is going to make the case that the third party cookie deprecation and potentially the breakup of Google and others in big tech is an opportunity to reboot the ads industry towards better metrics. I'm looking forward to this discussion. Hey Eros, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you?
Eris Levin
Hey Alan, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Alan Chappelle
So we're talking about third party cookie deprecation and addressability and the idea that those things have taken on a tremendous amount of oxygen in the digital media space really for as long as I can remember. I think that there's a lot of people on the business side of ad tech that take it as self evident that having a backbone of a UID is going to be critical to their ad monetization. You know, then I started talking with measurement guys like Rick Bruner who are suggesting that maybe having that backbone is less important, at least if your goal is measurement. And then you and I started talking over beers recently and you suggested that getting rid of cookies might actually increase ad quality. And so I'm not looking to put words in your mouth, but can you share a little bit about, you know, what you're thinking about there?
Eris Levin
You know, I know you have a bit of a mixed audience, so I'll sort of COVID off on the business side and privacy and sort of weave in for folks that are closer to media and not. I think maybe one of the best analogies that I love to frame this up is there's a British statistician named George Box and his quote that I love is all models are wrong, some are useful. Now it's really profound in that statement and assumes a lot of things and I think explains a lot about our industry. I recently sort of flipped this a little bit with admittedly a little bit of a negative lens, but I think it's more sort of prescriptive. And I thought about not models, but more metrics, more measures of media effectiveness. And so all metrics, not necessarily all, but they can be useful but misleading. And I think that's a really key point that I think about and I think we've seen over time where these models are wrong, these metrics are wrong. Some of them could be useful and sort of guide us in the right way, but at some point they can be really misleading if you over rely on them. And I think that's sort of the point that we've gotten to. Maybe it wasn't always the case, especially earlier on in the Internet when we had robust cookies and sort of the size of the, the market was a lot smaller. But over time I think it flips, right? You start to rely on these things, you take them as almost scripture, right? You just assume that they are fully accurate and that effectiveness goes down. And I think we crossed that threshold some time ago. And what happens is when you cross that threshold, it's not just that the marketers sort of invest in the wrong ways. They also then are signaling to the market about what they care about. And so all of a sudden you could think about something really basic like clicks, which aren't necessarily reliant on a cookie, but that becomes the most important signal. And so everything becomes sort of optimized to try to potentially even steal clicks, right? Like fat finger and X buttons and things like that. You can think about the same thing with things that are fueled by more cookie based decisions. Now I'll sort of add one other sort of point and layer to this. You know, there's currencies I think like not in the traditional sense of currencies, but like what fuels the industry, what drives it, what's literally sort of informing spend in different directions. And I think there's a bunch of quote unquote vanity metrics that I see very commonly and people know. So you think about reach was probably the Original and ultimate sort of vanity metric or, or became the vanity metric impressions viewability, completed views within video, but those on their own probably aren't enough to convince marketers and procurement teams and everyone else that the media is effective. The backup metric for all of those metrics that are sort of more front end on the media is a conversion. And that conversion is typically some sort of attribution based view through conversion, at least in the programmatic realm. And so that's sort of, my view is that the cookie helped steer us in this bad direction. It's not like the cookie is inherently bad. It's this neutral technology in a lot of ways. But eventually we followed it and over relied on it. And so I think that's what sort of led us into, you know, essentially incentivizing a lot of the low quality media and low quality ad buying that we see.
Alan Chappelle
So is this a, is this a cookie issue or just an overall addressability issue?
Eris Levin
I don't know if I'd call it an addressability issue because, you know, before the cookie there was no addressability. And marketing worked. It worked very well. It was just much more probabilistic, it was much more modeled. And so addressability gave us this concept of deterministic, you know, modeling and targeting and attribution and things like that. And it was maybe at some point fairly accurate. Like going back, it was useful, it was less misleading. But over time, more devices, more screens, it was really hard to know for sure what was contributing to the outcomes that we were measuring. But we still treated those outcomes as being, you know, deterministically, incrementally caused by the ads that people were exposed to.
Alan Chappelle
Got it. Okay, so let me play a little bit devil's advocate here. So, and I'm going to use an analogy like this is like a Bob Dylan song and we are heading on a motorcycle speeding off of a cliff, and we realize that speeding off of that cliff is, it's bad. Like we don't want to run our bike over this cliff. What you're suggesting is that we put on a blindfold so that we can no longer see where we're going as we're going off this cliff. How far off of mine? How obnoxious an analogy is that?
Eris Levin
It's not a bad analogy. I actually made that analogy for many years as I was advocating for a shift towards quality and to probabilistic modeling. I thought we were over reliant on these really flawed systems that were not durable. They weren't long for this world, especially when Cookies were announced to be going away, but even before. And so I said let's build a parallel sort of highway right on the side while we're continuing to sort of speed down this way, let's build this new path that then we can shift over, which is something that is not saying, you know, put the blinders on. It's saying let's just assume and know that we can't know deterministically the effectiveness of every single individual ad at an incremental level. And so let's start to think about probabilities and modeling and cohorts and things of that nature. Just like marketing was always done, right. It's, you know, in the TV broadcast era, before digital, we didn't know these things yet marketing still worked on average and sort of large populations we knew how it worked and so we can sort of go back to that framing. Not entirely. There's definitely digital can give us additional signals. But let's understand where they're useful and not misleading. Let's understand where they're wrong and not put too many of our sort of bets based off of those models.
Alan Chappelle
I like how you're thinking and in part I like how you're thinking because I tend to have these types of conversations quite frequently with folks who, in the privacy space and where often there's sort of a moral discussion being had that tracking is, is morally bad. And by the way, I'm not even discounting that argument, but I'm making a broader point that oftentimes there's a lack of appreciation of trade offs and a failure to maybe understand that there are often competing interests. The eu, you know, privacy is a fundamental human right. Sometimes forgets that, you know, businesses also need to keep the lights on and now the business is right to keep the lights on may not, you know, may not trump, forgive the pun, your right to, to privacy, but it also shouldn't be completely discounted. So I'm, I'm with you so far but I, I just wonder if what you're really asking for here is just a complete rethink of the metrics and not necessarily a rethink of the backbone.
Eris Levin
Yeah, you know, I'm, I think a lot about what's in my scope, what's realistic to be changed by this industry. I also know the limits. Like going back to your earlier point, I'm not very privacy sensitive like about my, my personal stuff, but I know that other people are, and I acknowledge that they are have a right to be and, and that's totally fine and I don't want to decide what is right from a privacy standpoint. That's something society should sort of decide together. So I put that aside. I'm like, I can't really affect that. That's either going to be decided by society and by governments and legislators and everyone else. And everyone's going to go and make their best case and we decide how to balance all of these things together. What I can think about is how to get marketers the most effective spend that they can, how to make sure that our ecosystem, which needs to be right historically always was this balance between advertisers and publishers and consumers. They're all need to. It has to be this sort of symbiotic relationship. And if that is imbalance, it's off kilter, which I believe it has been because of the way that these metrics are being used. The way that we measure the effectiveness of media can rebalance that. And I do think that it can do that actually in a more privacy safe way. And so that's why it's like, oh, that's an extra benefit. But I don't come at it from that lens.
Alan Chappelle
I understand that and didn't want to bring you on here. As a privacy person. I actually like having a diversity of opinion here. And so the fact that you've come at it from a different angle, to me, I see it as a huge strength. So I'm going to shift a little bit here. And so a few weeks ago I wrote a piece discussing the Infosum acquisition by Group M. And one of the issues I see with not necessarily just the data clean room space, but just the use of privacy enhancing technologies is that they often operate at the expense of transparency, which then creates its own marketplace trust issues. And so, and I've sort of branded that as the privacy transparency paradox. My little hat tip to Eric Seufert, who does that kinds of stuff all the time. But I think it's, it's a challenge that's inherent within privacy enhancing technologies. And so, you know, my question is like, as a media futurist, if we're moving away from third party cookies, does that help or hinder some of the already problematic transparency issues that are inherent in the industry?
Eris Levin
It's hard to know because I don't know exactly what the implications are. I think there will be places where it is beneficial and also like, who are you asking? Because some folks that take a really hard stance on privacy might see it one way and other people actually see this as a benefit and they are still concerned about privacy. I generally think this is better, but it's the same thing. Like the concept of fingerprinting. A lot of people might argue this is better in some ways because it's like not as individually assumed or something like that. But then others can say that the issue is that somebody can't clear their cookies. It's less transparent. So it's a little bit hard for me to say. I was actually heartened to hear some of the language around this acquisition and the rationale for it and why WPP specifically was interested, at least just based on what was conveyed publicly. And this concept that they have of intelligence beyond identity. I think that's really interesting. I've long advocated for a world where we are not wholly reliant on identity to fuel all of our ad investments. There is simply, even in a cookie world, we didn't know everyone, we didn't know deterministically who they were. We just had cookies. Now we've lost so many of the signals. Probably almost half of what's out there we have to acknowledge. And it's not like first party data is going to make up for that. So there's always going to be so much inventory and probably a growing amount, as you think about out of home and things like that, that there's just no identifier associated with it. We have to learn how to value that media that doesn't have a deterministic identifier. Maybe you know something about the cohort, the audience, the makeup of that, that audience composition by that time of day or that show or something else, but we have to start to learn how to value that media that doesn't have an identifier attached to it.
Alan Chappelle
I am with you 100% that we as an industry have failed to adequately invest in cohort modeling other types of privacy safe or privacy safer targeting. The challenge around where we've ended up, and maybe this gets at your original premise, is that oftentimes all the privacy enhancing technologies are doing is sort of moving the goalposts on where the privacy risks are. So you know, if you talk to the DCR folks, they'll often tell you how safe the data is. But what they're not telling you is a, in order for this to work, you're requiring a number of entities to compile very large amounts of data that often sits at the client side even before it gets transferred in there. And so that that creates its own perhaps set of privacy risks. And then the second thing is that often those things net out into some form of pseudonymous identifier, which then gets populated through the programmatic space anyway. And so like, and then the third challenge is that there's an open question about how those models are viewed for things like, you know, if your real problem is that you're singling out, you know, at risk communities. You know, I don't know that there's been enough investment there to say that, you know, this privacy tool is actually better than even the status quo at not, not creating situations where, you know, people who are at risk are, are being singled out in negative ways. So, yeah, other than that, they're great.
Eris Levin
But, but that's not the play, Mrs. Lincoln, you know.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, and, and I don't want to come off as the cynic here. I, I really wish there was some more investment in a lot of those areas. And, and I, I will concede that if Google had its way in this and the third party cookie had been deprecated from Chrome in like 01, sorry, 2021, you know, we might have seen a lot more investment and maybe that alone is a reason enough to quit them. The problem I have is in going back to my Bob Dylan motorcycle analogy is like, it really sucks to quit something when you don't know what the viable alternative is. And then that kind of gets me into my next set of questions, which is like, how does this work in an era of walled gardens where, you know, should the rest of us make our targeting technologies worse when there's a number of entities who don't just have a backbone, but they have an identifiable backbone, you know, email, real world identities, collection of data across, you know, hundreds of thousands of sites. So I know I've just filibustered here, but like, I guess where the question I'm going with is like, how does this work in an era where we're still trying to compete, we being the small ad tech guys, are trying to compete with the big walled gardens?
Eris Levin
You know, I generally again, to go back, like, there's so many things out of the control and purview and considerations outside of just marketing effectiveness. You know, like, I could tell you what's going to be the most effective channel or use case or things like that, but that has some risks on privacy and legislation and things like that. So I put those aside for a second because I do think for the most part, like, we're, we're definitely not, I know this for, for a fact, really, we're not doing our best in terms of maximizing the effectiveness of the media and marketing investments. And I do think that as the North Star actually solves a lot of these problems outright. I do think that there is hope here because like ultimately marketing should follow not 100%, but it's going to follow where users time and attention is, with a layer of where that time and attention spent is most valuable to marketers. So it's not just time and attention, but it's like if a marketer knows more about a user, about the context of that user, how receptive they are to ads at certain times of day, anything that they might know makes that media more valuable. And so I think that we still get to a point it's not like yes, the walled gardens will have a structural advantage. I do think that premium publishers, I don't know if you're talking about small guys in terms of ad tech or independent sort of media. I think on the independent media side, those that have quality media, those that users really value, that it's not a, you know, undifferentiated commodity, it's not a turkey chili recipe that you can get 5,000 of those on the Internet. It's something special, it's something different, it's something that maybe the users have a relationship with. Certainly some of their audience gets their newsletter goes there, that's sort of their one recipe site or their one sort of lifestyle site or whatever that is. But even those that just come and go and they say this has unique content, the news for example, somebody wants breaking news, they want in depth reporting, they want their local news that is valuable to users. And as long as that is true, as long as that's the place where they can get that and probably not get the same quality of it that's in their mind somewhere else, that's still going to be valuable for advertisers. And it's also an opportunity for those publishers to, you know, build those relationships, collect their own first party data and make sure that they even enhance that offering for advertisers.
Alan Chappelle
So do you see a very different web across premium publishers? The New York Times, the Washington Post and the recipe folks? I mean it's already starting to emerge, but do you see that further splintering over the next three to five years? And how's that going to look?
Eris Levin
I talk about the decommoditization of the ad and sort of media landscape. The way I see it is it's a little bit more sort of detailed. I think there's two lenses, but you can definitely think about sort of the more premium and the less premium, the more commoditized. If it's helpful. I can sort of explain the way that I think it's going to break out is a little bit more of a four different quadrants. Right. I have a two by two where you have high attention media, high attention placements.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, let's walk through that. I love me, I love me a Gartner quadrant.
Eris Levin
So the way I think about how advertisers will value media is whether the placements are high attention or low attention and of course it's a range and whether the placements themselves or the media, you know the opportunity has some audience data, some valuable audience data attached to it. Now that could be a first party audience signal or it could just be something you know about that publisher. The example I give there is like the ft. I don't have to know exactly who is reading that article on the FT for that to be very valuable to me as somebody who's trying to reach a high net worth individual. And so the way that you see this sort of two by two breakout is high attention media that also has some audience data attached to it is going to be really valuable. You're going to sort of see this really like kind of medium value where it's high attention media that doesn't necessarily have much audience data attached. Right. A big giant billboard, the Super Bowl. Right. Like still really valuable even if you don't know exactly who that is. Conversely, the FT might have a 300 by 250. It's not super high attention but if I get a little bit of somebody's attention it's still really important to me. And then in that low attention and no audience data attached to it is sort of this long tail mfa like not MFA as in it's all bad but what's the value? How do buyers assign value to it and where. I think it gets really interesting in this sort of four box quadrant, especially on the top right sort of high attention and with audience data attached that's really scarce. I think about everything. I'm biased in terms of supply and demand. And so we've treated supply as somehow infinite. All supply, good supply. There is real scarcity for quality media. And so that's going to be the most scarce and the most valuable meaning with the highest demand. And so you're going to see those prices really go through the roof. And I think it's also going to become a bit of a seller's market. It already kind of is today. But if you think about CTV with first party audiences attached, that is really valuable. Those publishers are going to be able to not play. They're not playing in the Programmatic open auction. They're selling their stuff upfronts, reservations, Programmatic guaranteed. And they're selling it for really top dollar. And so I think we're going to see sort of that split with different buying types, different CPMs and most importantly, and I won't go deep into this unless you want to. One of the issues I think we've seen with Programmatic is buyers are actually buying the premium and they're paying more. Right. Everyone says like oh they're no one wants to pay a lot for this media. I think they are paying for it. But they're also trying to get the, you know, dollar cost average weighing down those average CPMs by filling with cheap stuff because that's what they want to see at the end of the day. And so I think we're going to see buyers start to pay per value, right. The CPM per value. And they're not going to just try to rely on averages and cheap stuff to sort of fill their spend and bring those averages down.
Alan Chappelle
So I'm just curious, in your quadrant, what percentage I'm holding you exact numbers, but just directionally what percentage of each quadrant is going to be like full on Programmatic, like what percentage of Programmatic is going to be, you know, is going to take of that ad spend in each quadrant?
Eris Levin
Yeah, so I, I had it broken out and I have it on my LinkedIn if anyone wants to see. But and super directional. But that top right quadrant most valuable, I think it's about 10% of all supply and 50% of the spend. So the CPMs are going to be really high. I think 80 to 90% of that is bought in reservations upfront. It's not really biddable. I think in the other two sort of more medium value quadrants you're going to see, you know, a little bit more even supply and demand, call it 30% of supply and demand for each of those CPMs will be kind of in that middle range and I think you'll see a split. I think you'll see a lot of that bought upfront reservations pg. But there will also be biddable media there. There's still going to be some liquidity in that market. So call it 50% is still open and that will vary probably over time and seasonally in different media types and things like that. But I think there will be sort of more interesting technology layers to add on top and then in this like MFA category, which will be so much supply, especially with AI but even without it, there's just so much of this like long tail content out there, but it's only going to be a small amount of the demand. So this is going to be sort of penny CPMs and programmatically and certainly if I'm a buyer, I'm saying, oh, I really want to reach everyone I can in Milwaukee because for whatever reason, and so I can, I'm willing to buy some of that slop or some of the, you know, lower quality ads and media without knowing exactly who it is as long as I'm paying a small price for it.
Alan Chappelle
What needs to change in order for there to be a rethinking of the quality versus slop analysis? Because it seems like aren't the incentives set up in a way that you, you want to have a big impressive media campaign and you, so you pull data from a whole bunch of different things. It's like the, you know, the idea that, that look at, I'm no, you know, media person but, but it does seem like, you know, if you're presenting something to the client you want to like, oh yeah, we got you on Disney and New York Times and then we got this stuff for reach because that's really valuable too. Like it sounds like the, the reach stuff isn't as valuable. And how do we get the incentives to align so that the media buying folks, the agency folks aren't incented to keep throwing slop.
Eris Levin
Yeah, really hard because I actually, I think the corporate incentives for the marketers are aligned. It's just the personal right. The individual incentives are not there. There's a whole lot of reasons for this. Human based incentive based just the norms, right? Who, you know, no one got fired for buying IBM, no one got fired for buying completed Views or Reach or something else. And certainly, you know, we've seen folks that stick their head out and try to say, hey, maybe the way we're doing things aren't right. That's not what everyone wants to hear. That's not what their bosses want to hear. That's not what everyone wants to hear. Everyone likes the easy, even if it's wrong, if everyone buys it. I don't remember if I'd share this with you, but my favorite truism about this industry, which was originally about journalism when I, when I read about it, was if you want to get really rich, lie to people who want to be lied to. And if you want to make a living, tell the truth to people who want to hear the truth. And if you want to be poor, tell the truth to People who want to be lied to. So I don't think people in this industry necessarily, most of them good people, they don't. They're not saying lie to me, but they're saying, give me a number that's like, good enough. Like, my boss is used to Roas, he's not going to challenge it. And they really probably believe it. And so I think that's the hard part to change. What we are seeing, though, is that change. I think we are seeing enough buyers that have seen the light. They know that, right? Mfa? All these examples, they've lost some confidence in the things that have propped up. Right. No one sees how we bought this. Mfa. And they ask questions, how could we buy that? Oh, because we only cared about reach and viewability and completed views. And then they say, well, maybe we need to rethink those metrics. Some of them do, others probably forget about it. And, you know, in six months, they're back to their sort of old ways. But every single time, every cycle, I think a few marketers realize, no, we need to change. This is actually a competitive edge for us. We can find opportunities for cheaper. We can get more efficiency here. And so I do think that we're slowly starting to see that change. But it's going to take a little while until enough marketers do and the ones that don't start to really feel the pain. Because I think if everyone is buying kind of unintelligently, there's almost like a standstill of sorts. But as soon as somebody in a category starts to buy smarter, they're going to start to steal market share. And then when the others notice, maybe heads roll. But eventually they also need to evolve their ways.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, I've often said that Coke doesn't care about any of this stuff so long as their media decisions are somewhere in the ballpark of what Pepsi's doing. Now, if Pepsi decides to get really, really smart about this and starts making better decisions, I would imagine that Coke is going to follow. But until that happens, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of incentives for Coke. All due respect, I'm just picking two companies, but. But there's not much.
Eris Levin
You know, those examples too.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah.
Eris Levin
And everyone understands it. And everyone, you know, can sort of empathize and understand. They buy Coke or they buy Pepsi. There's a really famous concept. I'll go into it in marketing called eSov. It's called excess share of voice. And the theory that held true basically until the digital era is that you can basically predict, let's say two buyers what their share of market is. So Coke has 60, Pepsi has 40. As long as they both advertise their share of voice, they're reaching consumers 60% of the time and 40% of the time they maintain their market share. As soon as one of them, let's say Pepsi starts to get 50% market share of voice, they start to eat into market share. So there's almost this like break even point. Where this broke is in digital where all reach is not created equal. And so this share of voice is really hard to calculate without putting quality on top. And that's where I think we will sort of get back to. Once you calculate a quality adjusted reach, you'll actually see this ESOV become true again.
Alan Chappelle
So just yesterday there was a decision that came out of Virginia where DoubleClick's ad tech stack was ruled a monopoly twice over. We've got the search decision and they're, they're moving to the remedies phase over the next couple of weeks. We've got Meta being sued on competitive grounds by the FTC and there may be a breakup there of Instagram and WhatsApp. We'll see how this shakes out. But it does seem like we are going to see a complete resetting of the table in one way or another, you know, over the next couple of years. And I guess my question to you is, you know, how do you see that impacting the larger media landscape? Is this an opportunity for people like you who are trying to change the mindset of the industry to do that? And like, what is it you're going to do over the next couple of years that's going to help push us through? Because I think there's a huge opportunity coming.
Eris Levin
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a forcing function to get off of whatever we're currently relying on. We're sort of addicted to. Right. Buyers are addicted to these metrics and these signals and the systems that really prop them up. It's really hard to move off of them. Ask any buyer that has moved from kind of legacy buying into quality and effectiveness. It's been a long, difficult transition. I think a really good one. All of them are super happy they've done it, but it was not a seamless thing to do. All of their systems, the way they buy, the way they measure, had to be updated. They had to train people, they had to make sure the relationships with their agencies, if they're working with agencies, still had to be sort of updated. And so a lot of buyers are going to have to go through that. And most are resistant. This can be a forcing function. This is where you don't have a choice. And this is, you know, I have long believed when cookies were announced to be going away and my other, you know, favorite topic around in stream and outstream video. I think when some of those sort of currencies that everyone's relying on and really prop up those fallacies, when that fallacy pops and is no longer believable. Right. That lie can't be believed anymore, that's going to force the market to reconsider. And I'm always going to say like we go back to the fundamentals of marketing, ESOV and quality and how often you're reaching people and measuring the value of marketing in both the short and the long terms. And so I think it's, it's going to be a great opportunity for us but everyone has to be, you know, ready to, to adapt. It's not no longer business as usual.
Alan Chappelle
Well and hopefully I do think there's a great opportunity here and I'm hoping collectively we don't squander it. Before I let you go, we typically ask guests on the Monopoly report pod you know what their semi secret hobby or passion is and I'm curious to know yours.
Eris Levin
Hobbies. I don't think I really have passions. I do have many and I don't know how secret they are because I'm generally pretty vocal about them as a category. I'd say it's corny, but I really like to affect positive social changes. I try to do that here in the ad space. But even outside the ad space I was a big advocate for men taking paternity leave and becoming, you know, active dads. I become very sort of passionate about helping shift kids in within my community but outside, away from this like smartphone based childhood into a play based childhood, there's a lot of different things like that. And so whenever I see an opportunity to probably put a little bit of an effort and try to start a social movement and change norms, I get really excited to do that.
Alan Chappelle
Well, very cool, Eris. You're making the world a better place, man. God bless you.
Eris Levin
Thank you. I'm trying.
Alan Chappelle
Thanks for coming on.
Eris Levin
Thanks for having me.
Alan Chappelle
That was a great conversation. I really like to explore the intersection between some of the regulatory issues and business issues when it comes to cookies and addressability. I'm looking forward to checking out Eris Levin's publisher quadrant analysis in particular as I think we sometimes fall into a one size fits all model in the ad space. Which really tends to understate some really important nuance. We've got a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up in the Monopoly Report podcast over the next few weeks. Please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpod.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
The Monopoly Report: Episode 26 - Will Deprecating Cookies Improve the Quality of the Ads Space?
Release Date: April 23, 2025
Host: Ari Paparo (Alan Chappelle)
Guest: Eris Levin, Media Futurist and Former Google Executive
In Episode 26 of The Monopoly Report, host Alan Chappelle engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Eris Levin, a seasoned media futurist with over fifteen years of experience at Google. The discussion centers on the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, the future of addressability in digital advertising, and the broader implications for ad quality and industry metrics.
[01:43] Alan Chappelle sets the stage by outlining the industry's reliance on third-party cookies and unique identifiers (UIDs) for ad monetization. He contrasts this with newer perspectives from measurement experts like Rick Bruner, who question the necessity of UIDs if the primary goal is accurate measurement. This leads into Eris Levin's provocative assertion that removing cookies could enhance ad quality.
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“All metrics, not necessarily all, but they can be useful but misleading.” — Eris Levin [02:32]
Alan challenges Levin by comparing the removal of cookies to putting a blindfold on a motorcycle speeding toward a cliff, questioning whether this shift sacrifices precision for quality. Levin counters by emphasizing the need to build parallel systems that focus on probabilistic modeling and cohort analysis, rather than abandoning accurate tracking altogether ([07:19]).
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“Let's assume and know that we can't know deterministically the effectiveness of every single individual ad at an incremental level.” — Eris Levin [07:19]
Challenging Levin on the intersection of privacy-enhancing technologies and transparency, Alan introduces the "privacy transparency paradox." He argues that while these technologies aim to protect privacy, they often compromise transparency, leading to trust issues within the marketplace ([10:59]).
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“We have to learn how to value that media that doesn't have a deterministic identifier.” — Eris Levin [12:00]
Levin introduces a four-quadrant model to categorize media based on attention levels and audience data availability, challenging the industry's traditional one-size-fits-all approach ([19:33]).
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“It's going to be the most scarce and the most valuable meaning with the highest demand.” — Eris Levin [20:07]
Levin discusses the difficulty in aligning individual incentives with corporate goals to prioritize quality over quantity in media buying ([25:41]). She suggests that market shifts, driven by improved metrics and smarter buying strategies, will gradually compel advertisers to adopt more effective practices.
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“If everyone is buying kind of unintelligently, there's almost like a standstill of sorts. But as soon as somebody in a category starts to buy smarter, they're going to start to steal market share.” — Eris Levin [25:41]
Alan highlights recent antitrust actions against major tech players like DoubleClick and Meta, pondering how these regulatory changes might serve as a catalyst for Levin’s vision of a revamped advertising landscape ([28:03]).
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“Once you calculate a quality adjusted reach, you'll actually see this ESOV become true again.” — Eris Levin [28:33]
As the conversation wraps up, Levin shares her passion for driving positive social change, particularly advocating for men's involvement in paternity leave and promoting play-based childhoods over smartphone-centric ones ([32:29]).
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
“We are definitely not, I know this for, for a fact, really, we're not doing our best in terms of maximizing the effectiveness of the media and marketing investments.” — Eris Levin [10:59]
Episode 26 of The Monopoly Report offers a deep dive into the complex interplay between technology, privacy, and advertising efficacy. Eris Levin's insights challenge industry norms, advocating for a shift away from overreliance on third-party cookies and traditional metrics towards a more nuanced, quality-focused approach. As regulatory pressures mount and the digital landscape continues to evolve, Levin's vision presents both a challenge and an opportunity for advertisers to redefine success in the ad space.
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