Brand Safety, AdTech and the death of the Cookie with Joe Zappa

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Now let's go mix it up. So welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna. I am the founder of the CRO Collective and you know, it's been an interesting week. I'm talking to a lot of people about marketing and the CMO and the CRO and that's been a really very provocative topic for people. We can get into it in another podcast, but needless to say, I think that a lot of people are starting to see that the C Suite is crowded and that it needs to be rethought. And I'm glad to hear that that's the case. To that end, you know, I'm on social media a lot, as you know. You know, and I'm doing a lot of noise there. And someone I interact with a lot is Joe Zappa, who I'm really glad to have here today. You know, Joe is Martech and ad tech executive whom has a great deal of understanding and knowledge of the advertising technology space as I do. So we're like minded because, you know, I came back from, I came from that background. So I thought, you know, it would be great to have Joe on because some of the things that we talk about in our social media engagements make good fodder for a, for a conversation. So, Joe, welcome.

Yeah, Warren, thanks so much for having me on. I'm the founder of Shark Pen Media, which is marketing strategy, content and PR for ad tech and Martech companies. And basically we're talking all the time about building brands. So I know we're going to get further into that today, today and looking forward to it.

Yeah, tell us about that.

So what do you do for your.

Clients and what kind of clients do you serve?

Yeah, I was an ad tech and Martech journalist, so I first hopped over to the dark side in marketing and was ghostwriting bylines for ad tech and Martech executive suites and then, you know, quickly realized that a lot of my clients needed more than that tactical support. They Basically needed a partner who could think with them about how to build a brand. So what is the message? Where are we going to distribute the message? And then finally that piece I started with, which is actually creating the content to do that.

I see, so you're, you're helping companies identify their messaging and get their brand story clear.

Yeah, like in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years ago, you probably would have just called it a PR agency. I mean, we do pr. But what I found, and you could weigh in on this as a former ad tech exec, is a lot of ad tech companies, especially the small ones, they don't have enough news really to make the most of a 10k per month PR engagement. So I don't really view it like that. Like, to me, PR is a discipline. It's a tool among others. Like what they need is to build a brand. They need to build their reputations and start relationships with customers and other stakeholders. PR is one way to do that. Content marketing is another way to do that. And so we take a more holistic approach.

Right.

I'm completely in agreement with you. And I do think that PR agencies have their place in the market. Most of the time, bigger companies, whom have a lot more at stake, need PR firms to help manage crisis issues. You know, I'm very familiar with all this. My agency does a lot of that. We do a lot of reputation repair, reputation management. But mostly what we're doing, like you, is content development for the purposes of driving expertise and thought leadership in the marketplace. So, you know, that being said, I know that you're also working with a couple of companies that I work with, you know, particularly in the contextual space, which I'm very interested in. You know, I do think that it's interesting to sort of look at the trajectory of the, let's call it the performance or advertising, programmatic advertising space over the last 10 years, which I've been a part of, and how the proliferation of dollars that went into the technologies that distribute billions and billions of ad impressions across the marketplace, you know, had all these, you know, kind of inherent problems that all exposed themselves. You know, first, it's just a lot of it doesn't work. There's a lot of ad fraud. It's a big problem. You know, if you're just distributing a lot of things to a lot of people every second of the day, there's just gonna be problems, you know, and a lot of it had to be worked out in real time. And it's been fascinating to watch the first One, I think if I look at the evolution of it was just, just getting all the pieces to work together, like all the different ad tech stacks and how they all work together and identifying audiences. And then there was the attribution problem, which is, how do you prove that the ads worked? Give me evidence of that. So attribution became a big topic for a long time. Just being able to provide data that shows that my ad resulted in your sale, which I still don't think is really possible to do to the level that people claim, but we can have another conversation about that some other time. And then the other issues were interesting, right? Which were privacy, my information's being siphoned off all my phones and data is the new oil and all that.

You know, do I really want all.

My data being sold to advertisers and why am I getting barraged and all this information that I never requested. And then the other part of it came too, which was, you know, not just privacy, but also surveillance, marketing. You know, this idea that people listening to me all the time, you know, how is this, are we moving into a new space? And is the advertising technologies really, are they really just like listening devices and things and all these other things. And then the interesting part of it too came to where do brands end up? They advertise, what environments did they end up in? And that's where this sort of brand safety industry came to bear, which was an output outcome of these mass distribution is on occasion my ad might show up in a place I don't want it to. Right. Which is an understandable issue that needs to be addressed. And so an industry was created around protecting people from that. And I think that's what you and I just were talking about recently was just about how these outcomes or these unintended outcomes of programmatic, programmatic advertising have resulted in other whole industries designed to protect people from an industry that's having other issues. So I'm just curious, I mean, what your general thoughts are when you talk to companies and brands about this topic related to how they're doing this? I mean, how are you, what are you hearing from your clients around how they're dealing with that sort of stuff.

As you were talking, I was wondering if we can posit that we're in a general period right now in digital advertising of reevaluating ad tech products, promises, right? So if you think about attribution, you had what I think is a key phrase, which is like, I don't know if it's possible to the level that some have suggested it's like, so especially with third party cookies, which are now going away, or with the Apple's identifier for advertisers, which was mostly killed a couple years ago, it used to be possible certainly to some degree to say, you know, you reach someone on this side and they went on this other side and they purchased something and advertisers have gotten really hooked on that. Because it's not just a question of performance, it's an interpersonal question of proving performance that they could then go back to the agencies could go back to their brand client and they could say, not only did we generate these results, but we can prove on this dashboard for all to see that we drove those results. So the industry got hooked on multi touch attribution. Now I think especially with privacy changes going away, enforcing the question, a lot of people are saying, well, surely multi touch attribution wasn't like a complete scam, or at least most people, I think would agree with that statement. But to what degree was it true and what did it sort of allied like, what did it force us to focus on? Because we would only do marketing tactics that lent themselves to that measurement model. And then I think you're seeing a similar thing with contextual targeting and brand safety where brands are saying, you know, we only want to be in high quality content environments that are brand safe. And the way they are trying to achieve that relatively lofty standard is indulging in overly broad keyword block lists and other tactics that just end up demonetizing vast swaths of content that they otherwise claim to believe in and to understand are important to say, culture and democracy. Yep. Right. So it's like brand safety can probably be operationalized on some level, but I think a lot of people take an overly broad approach to it. And that's where you have brands in this difficult position, for example, of saying, oh, we believe in news, but we're demonetizing all, you know, hard news content because we think it might be our readers might perceive it as negative and therefore we don't want to be associated with it. Or we support, you know, reaching diverse audiences and supporting diverse publishers. But we don't want to show up next to anything that's going to be politically divisive.

Right, I agree. And I think that's sort of the area that I'm interested in because the kind of road to hell is paved with good intentions, you know, So I do think let's just be sort of intellectually very clear here and honest about the issue. Right. So I think no one would argue with a couple of facts about. Let's use brand safety for an example. In this conversation right now is the initial problem was errant distribution of ads that may be delivered in a wasteful way. Right. So if I'm spending money on impressions, I want to know that all those impressions are going to be utilized in accordance with the payment that I'm giving. I don't want waste.

Right?

And waste would be going to sites where there are no people, you know, or there's no audience there, or publishers that aren't real or they're fraudulent.

Right.

I mean, there's no question about the fact that anybody would agree that that's probably a good solution to ensure that my money, every dollar, is being spent directly against the impression that I know is delivered. So that would be kind of, you know, ad delivery, that the ad was delivered and then the other one is the ad is viewed. Right. That there's a viewability issue. That we want to make sure that when the ad is delivered that people can see it, you know, and that we can verify that it was viewable or that it was viewed. I think probably being viewed be better than viewable, honestly. But that's fine. And then another one is fraud. There's no question that there should be measures in place to make sure that fraud is being. Because there's always going to be bad actors out there that try and siphon money off these systems. It's ongoing every day. So I would pay. If I was an advertiser or spending billions of dollars or hundreds of thousand dollars or so on advertising, I'd want an ad fraud protection measure because I don't think anybody argued these are rel. I would say sort of neutral agreements that no one would argue with because everybody wants those things where it starts to get interesting to me where the goalposts get widened and I find problematic is now. And it has to do with some terminology. I personally think that the initial term of brand safety and the word safety right away is a red flag to me because, you know, if I hear the word unsafe or it means like I'm gonna get hit by a car or I'm gonna get into an accident or I'm gonna eat poison, you know, that. That my safet of is is an issue there. And I think the word safe is probably appropriate. But is the word safety appropriate here? I think there's a bit of some hyperbole there. And I don't know if brands are unsafe. I think they might be, you know, they need to be brand appropriate.

Right.

Or a brand fit.

Right.

So. Or right away. I think the word safety in a way created a ripe umbrella for a lot of things to be stuffed underneath that, that don't necessarily fit the term and they're arbitrary and open to interpretation, mainly ones. So for example, if you're looking at context as you that determination, I mean, if a brand goes to the advertising organization and says we want our ads to show up in these types of environments, well, that's the client's request and I should fulfill on that request. Their opinion is really, is not, is not, not germane to my execution. That's what they want. They want ads to show up in these places. They have every right to have whatever opinion they want. It's their product, it's their money. Fine. I'll put in place whatever white labeling and other targeting, you know, parameters I can do to make sure that it goes in the places that you want. But now when the brand safety company is making a decision about what's safe or not, that's, that's a completely different story now. It's not the same.

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It on the website. Thanks. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are on, like, how the goalposts widened and the safety terminology has become an opinion about content appropriateness and who is determinant of the appropriateness of something. Is it the brand? Is it the ad tech company? Is it the advertising agency? Like, where does that lie in your view?

Yeah, I completely agree with you that the brand should own it. My understanding, because really it's about what the brand wants, right? Like this is a business transaction. The brand decides what is our brand or what are our guidelines and therefore what content is suitable in the context of that brand. And they just, they should just tell the agency and the ad tech and brand safety vendors, these are the rules by which we want you to comply. I think where things get distorted is a brand marketer could articulate that entirely clearly to the agency, but then the agency is using a set of tools that do not understand the content algorithmically in this perfect way that you and I might understand it if we were just talking to a brand cmo, right? And that's where we get into things like the contextual intelligence question. It's like, okay, if you tell me you don't want to show up to stories about, you know, violence or refugees fleeing war zones, like, that's one thing. And we can also debate whether brands actually should be fleeing that content because it's not actually clear to me that that has a deleterious impact on the brand. Even if we agree that that's the goal, that won't necessarily be clearly filtered by brand safety tools. Right? Like, often a brand will say, I want to show up next to travel content. Right. And that travel content might include those refugee or war zone stories without them getting eliminated. So I think there's, I think there's complexity in like the sort of ad tech supply chain here that is making brand safety less effective than a lot of advertisers would hope.

But I agree with you, you're right. And I think those are all very much correct assessments. And at the same time too, the industry seems to be grow, right? It's a big category. And I Think that it's grown because I may say a couple things. One is, okay, so when you look at like a brand safety, which is, you know, a provocative nomenclature for this, who's unsafe, right? Like, what's the victim here, right? So if I'm a brand and I, I just want to get a certain demographic, let's say I want, you know, a big client of mine at a time that one of my teams worked on was lvmh, right? This is like the know, wealthiest, you know, products in the marketplace. Usually like the highest end, you know, high end type of affluent, targeted audiences in the world, right? The LVMH brands reach people who have a very specific incomes and, you know, affordability for, you know, the types of products that they sell. So they clearly, you know, wanted to be in very specific environments because just from commerce perspective, they only wanted to reach people who could afford, you know, a handbag that cost $10,000. And so those people have a very specific way and fine, it's completely appropriate. And those, they should get that. I mean, if that's spending their money on it, then they should be distributed in places where we know that that audience is. No one would argue the wisdom of just general audience targeting because it's just less wasteful, it's gonna be more effective from an advertising perspective in terms of its core goal, which is to get people to buy my products. I want to reach people that can buy my products. So it all makes sense, right? But that being said, now, if in fact there's a company who is in the, in the business of, let's say, quote, unquote, again, protecting the brand from bad audiences, which in this case, based on that one I just said, would be an audience that can't afford my products. But how about now, if that third party is making determination about other things, that that branch be protected from that, that maybe that brand didn't necessarily raise their hand and say they wanted to, but there's some, you know, let's say organization or group that's making some broad determinations about what we determined to be safe or appropriate. And we're going to do our best to make sure that you're protected. It just seems like a reach to me and I'm just curiously fascinating how it ended up getting there, right? That there was sort of a capture in a way of how information is being monitored and being protected in ways that are not germane to the original intention, which is just to try and build commerce commercial relationships. And I also think the other part of it the other the equation is whether or not people really care. Like, do people really care? Like, for example, I hear statistics all the time. You know, people trust brands more when X or people don't trust brands more when X. The touting of these statistics is very much around the idea that if someone sees an ad from your brand in a place that they find offensive, then they make an association with your brand. I don't think that's true. I know there's a lot of statistics that would say so. And I think they probably cite, you know, statistics or polls they've taken. And I don't think those polls are indicative of reality. And the example I always use is if I were to go, I did this once, by the way, I was in the middle of this whole topic. I was in Central park in New York and I went around and asked a whole bunch of people one day on a Saturday, this question. I said, do you care about your online information being stolen? I mean, who says no to that question?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Everybody said yes.

Right.

But meanwhile, literally most of the time when they're answering the question, they're on their phones texting some strange person or responding to an ad or buying an obscure product. So they don't care because they all.

Know that those are, let's call it.

You know, potentially unsafe practices, but they do it anyway. So people's actions are much more indicative of the answers they give in polls. I don't know if it's necessarily the case that brands have as much to lose here, but like you, this is where I want to talk to you is you're in the PR business. If it's a story comes out in the press that a very prominent brand ad was shown in a context that was unfavorable, that's the public relations outcome for that is bad for them and that drives bad consumer outcomes. Because now they read that story and all of a sudden they make the association because it gets exacerbated. So I think that some of it is almost self fulfilled. There's like, almost like a weird engine that happens where, you know, a story gets picked up because the brand is shown in front of an article about, let's say, the Holocaust or something like that. And all of a sudden now it becomes a story in itself. And these are the issues that people are willing to pay money for. So in your case, how much of that is brand safety and how much of that is more just managing crisis and communication strategies that are outcome of some of these things?

Yeah, I think generally speaking, brands are too afraid of a lack of safety and not afraid enough of languishing in obscurity. So I think this is especially relevant in B2B. I think, you know, when you have a giant enterprise and the brand is super well known, often the job of comms people, to your point, it's crisis communications, it's mitigation of reputational risk. And so those marketers at enterprises actually have a bias for inaction. But most companies out there, smaller companies, B2B companies, without extremely well known brands, they need to have a bias for action. And the thing that is least safe to them is not that, you know, one out of every 10,000 ads might show up in an inappropriate context. It's that no one knows who they are, or if they do know who they are, they never think about them and they wouldn't care if they went away. So I think we're on the same side here in the sense that brand safety has ballooned, not only in the sense of the various things it covers, which maybe it shouldn't encompass certain issues that it does today, but also in the sense that marketers are maybe too concerned about where they're showing up and not concerned enough about where they're not showing up.

So talk more about that if you don't mind a little more tactically. Like, what would your counsel be to brands in response to this particular topic and how they manage their brand identity? Yes.

So, you know, we both have a history in ad tech. I work in ad tech almost exclusively. The number one challenge for these B2B brands is that they're just invisible and no one thinks about them. Right. And so often when you come in as a marketing partner, you know, the three parts of marketing strategy are what is the message, where are we going to distribute the message? And how are we thinking about and generating value? And that second part is where a lot of brands in our business fall short because they're not, they're just not distributing the message nearly enough and nearly widely enough. And a lot of the challenge for the marketers who come in is just getting the brand to be more present and to say, all right, there are, you know, 20 ad tech companies in the world who are regularly producing social content and getting in front of advertisers and publishers. Whatever side of the business you're on, empower someone in that company. Like, if you're the CEO, CRO, cmo, you need to have someone who is empowered to just start posting content based on brand guidelines. So you have a series of, you know, house topics and POVs that you're all aligned on. But then you have to let people loose and just let them start creating content. And in my experience, again, the problem is not we're doing brand unsafe things, it's that we're not doing nearly enough, which is unsafe for a brand in the sense that the brand will do nothing to help the business if it doesn't exist and if the company isn't.

That's interesting. So you're, you're saying is the, let's say, potential. I don't know if it is an obsession, but the potential obsession with brand safety is they're looking in the wrong place. They should be less concerned about where they're not and more concerned about where they are.

Right. They're too concerned with protecting brands and not enough with growing brands. Like if you're. And it's completely different for, you know, B2C Enterprises, right, or Fortune 100 companies. Like if you're bank of America, you know, you have like 99% name recognition in among US consumers, right. It's completely different. But if you're a random dsp, you have, you need to have a tremendous bias for action and you need to be getting out there and you should be way less concerned about, you know, one of every 50 tweets I do, which I would say is true for me, someone responds something nasty. It's like, boo hoo, you know.

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And thank you. Yeah, so I see your point. So what you're saying then is in response to this brand safety, let's say, expansion.

Right.

Of its turf.

Right.

I, I, there's to some degree, maybe it's a distraction from the real mission.

Right. Worrying.

I mean, you know, it's an interesting point because I think like, okay, I would submit that you probably would agree that brand safety as an industry in terms of certainly where it's evolved to today is probably a more of a concern for companies that have a lot more at stake. So if I'm a publicly traded company, if I'm a large company with a lot of stakeholders, there's going to be a greater, unfortunately a greater deal of sensitivity around those types of messages because there's bigger reverberations on how it could affect things. I mean, I would imagine as crazy as this is, if my ads show up in the wrong place, it could infect my stock price if the story gets out. I mean, I know it's nuts, but that's just how the things work. Whether, whether customers care or not, which I don't think they do, the market will still move because just a bad story gets out there. And so there needs to be a safety measure in place. And I think if I, if I would say so, I'd say brand safety has become sort of a built in insurance policy. And you know, in this case the insurer is hyperbolically overinflating the risk to make their offering more valuable in the marketplace so that they can create more of a need for it. And you know, they look at it like a rounding error. What the hell, let's just keep this kind of brand safety effort going because it's good to have in case X, Y or Z. But how about brands that don't have as much at risk? Like, is it really such a big deal? Like, if I'm, like you said, if I'm a dsp, among the many that there are like a, let's say, $100 million DSP, I'm not publicly traded. I mean, is brand safety really an issue for them? Does it matter to. Or like, should they be doing this, worrying about this, or is it really more in your view? What I think you're saying is, no, be more vocal, get out there more, talk more about things. Do not less, you know, maybe this conservative. If I would use attitude around concern about being too vocal or being in the wrong places may in some may, curtailing a brand's ability to be more out there in the marketplace and getting their name across to people.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And B2B, I think the number one challenge that ad tech companies, for example, face. You talked about this on another episode about thought leadership is commoditization. Right? You have your dsp, there are tens of others. It's very hard for customers to differentiate among you. Same thing with, you know, SSPs, CDP, what have you. And so there are really two ways to overcome that. One is to have a differentiated message that speaks to what's different about your product and therefore why your customers are going to come to you and not the other companies in the category. And then the other is just to be more present than your competitors. And I think that's actually undervalued as a strategy in most B2B sectors because again, it's not like consumer, like a lot of those, a lot of B2B companies. There's no like Gen Z social media wizard creating viral posts all the time. Right. It's like these, these ecosystems. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Like for B2B companies, they are relatively uncontested territory. And so, you know, if you have that bias for action.

That's a really good point.

I'm glad you said that because it does make a distinction there, there. And it's a, it's one that, you know, it needs to be addressed because it's, it's so important. And that is a consumer brand is a much different issue than a B2B brand in this respect because consumer brands, I think, are more vulnerable in this regard.

Right.

I mean, you're right. I think that there just tends to be A little bit more of a focus on products that are specifically targeting, like, individuals as opposed to other. Other businesses. So that being said, I'm just. I'm just curious in your world, because I think it's worth asking, is, do you see a lot of B2B companies spending a lot of dollars on brand safety protections, or is it not really a concern of theirs as much?

I think with B2B companies, it's not that they have a budget for brand safety and they're spending millions of dollars on it. It's more baked into their attitude and their approach to marketing. So again, it's that. It's not that, you know, like, you probably have a ton of B2B CMOs and CROs who listen to this, and it's not that they are going to be, you know, they're going to have a budget line item for it, but I bet that either for them or maybe even more so for their people who are reporting to them, there, there's, again, there's. There's this bias for an inaction. There's conservatism. Let's stay safe. Is that okay? And you see this with, like, larger B2B companies as well. Like, you know, they have to run everything through legal. I mean, sure, it is what it is. Like, I get that there are regulatory conditions that larger companies are subject to, but what I would say to smaller companies that don't have those regulatory limitations, take advantage of it, because you have a huge advantage there. Like, they have more people, but all of their people are bound by red tape. And it takes them, you know, five days to get a social post out, whereas you can hire someone and be posting on Twitter 10 times a day. So get out there and speak to your customers and don't worry so much about, you know, preserving a brand that you haven't sufficiently.

Really great point. And so true. You know, when you're younger, let's say in your stage or your organization, you have a lot more flexibility that your larger competitors don't, and you need to take advantage of that. It's a very, very good point and it's a great piece of advice for Anyone running a B2B operation right now who hasn't reached the point where they're worried about the threat so much because they haven't reached the point where there's a lot at risk.

Right.

And I think that you're right. I mean, if a smaller company adopts the same conservativism as a larger one do they're doing themselves a disservice when they can get out much faster. You're right. There's probably a lot less restrictions. As a matter of fact, I think there's some degree to which the marketplace is probably forgiving of smaller organizations that make mistakes. They look like they're sort of being bold and all right, so they knocked over a little furniture. But you know, they're, they're really interesting as opposed to like Salesforce. If they knock over furniture, it's like front page news, you know. And I think that's really interesting point and I like that idea for speaking to a. Let's say, for example, someone who's running a marketing organization that's listening to this might be worth thinking about as a B2B brand. Are you being as out there not bold with your messaging as you could be, or are you maybe buying into some of the mythology of safety as a, you know, a bulwark to you really getting the word out? And maybe you should be thinking more about just taking advantage of where you're at right now. It's really, really, really good point. I'd like to just switch on another topic, which is the thing around contextual advertising, because we've talked about this a lot, you and I, and I know we're pretty involved in that. You know, if anyone understands, you know, contextual advertising is not targeted so much, it's just about, you know, the environment that you're in. Right. So TV originally was a contextual advertising, was the original contextual ads. You know, there was no targeting you. They didn't know what household you were in. They just knew what the show was about and they just showed ads they knew generally was that audience was watching that show. And contextually you'd sort of be, you know, take advantage of your association with that content. Content. And you know, you, by being associated with that content, you'd be able to develop some relevance. And, you know, contextual advertising has taken on much more sophistication these days. But essentially the principle is still the same, which is we don't need cookies. We don't need to use these, you know, pixels to target people's information. We can just look and see the types of topics that people are interested in and showing them ads associated with those topics because we know that by association we can benefit from it. What are your thoughts on this? I mean, is this, do you think with the third party cooking going away that that's where things are going to go? And if so, you know, where's the cookie going to go? Are we really going to see the pixel go away fully or is that really going to happen? Because I, I'm skeptical about that.

I think, you know, contextual advertising is enjoying a resurgence. I think a lot of brands, all brands are going to have to take a look at it, if they aren't already, right? Just to replace some of that signal that they've lost as a result of, you know, app tracking, transparency and the mobile environment. And now the third party cookie deprecation on Chrome. And of course, Apple had already killed third party cookies a couple years ago. So brands are going to have to test courting people based on what they're consuming and not who they are. I do think, however, that there are differences among the contextual advertising providers and that's where you're going to see new entrants into the space who are saying, you know, that cookie cutter taxonomies, like if you're just using the IAB taxonomy to figure out which content you should be placing ads next to, maybe that's not enough, right. Maybe there are deeper levels of analysis that are possible. So for example, we both work with a company called Advanced Contextual. I know what they're doing is they're analyzing the page in its context. So again, it's not just that you're a hospitality brand and so you're going to show up to any travel content. They can get a little more granular than that, right. So that if you want to avoid, you know, that refugee story and you want to be next to more positive travel stories, they're able, they're able to enable that. There's also the ability to use contextual intelligence to target people on both the open web and in walled gardens. So I think that's another thing we'll be seeing is people trying, advertisers trying to connect the dots to be able to have, you know, cross platform strategies even as signature.

So do you think the cookie is going to disappear completely or are there no longer going to be any kind of universal identifiers for audiences? Is that really going to disappear?

My, my guess would be that the third party cookie on Chrome will go away entirely. Part of the reason that I think this, even though Google has kicked the can down the road so many times, is because, I mean, Apple did it right, like we often forget. I think as a community that Apple got rid of third party cookies on Safari years ago. Now Apple is generally way less concerned than Google is with how the advertising community is going to, to react to their policy changes. But it shows that, you know, it's possible. It's something a big, big tech platform can do. And I feel like Google has put so much work into the privacy sandbox that they're going to roll with that. Another reason Google has an incentive to actually phase out third party cookies is like that's going to be a bigger challenge for the open web publishers than it is for Google because Google already has a massive store of first party data via, you know, Gmail, YouTube and all of its other properties. And Google can just do the performance max thing like it can say, okay, come to us, tell us what outcomes you want and don't worry about it, we'll make them work across all of our properties. I think the end of third party cookies is a much bigger problem for open web publishers than it is.

I would agree with and I would also say to both those points I want to answer to address them is my opinion is the reason why Apple got rid of it is because Apple has other business models that make it fine for them to do without really losing a lot of money. I mean their app store alone is, you know, like a trillion dollar business closely they sell these phones for $1,000 and even though they're, you know, moderately profitable, they still know how to do it. So you know, Apple had the ability from their market cap and the way that they run the their business and their commercial model that by doing it it gave them the patina of being more concerned about their customer safety and customers identity protection than other brands did and it gave them a differentiator in the marketplace. So I think whether it's, you know, cynical or true, it's a fact that I don't have to worry about Apple sharing my information because they don't do advertising and they're just looking to help me connect with other apps and stuff like that. Whereas Google's business is almost 100% predicated on advertising dollars. That's their business model. So for doing it, it's a bigger risk for them because it affects their bottom line more. But to your point, yes, they've masked such data at this point and they have so many other products in the marketplace that people use that are connected to their devices that now they could probably create their own ecosystem and they just have to stop doing business with outside people and maybe close off everything and work inside Google which they'd own the whole thing, which could be good and bad because you know, Google's not necessarily going to be objective at that point. You're only going to get what Google serves you right.

That being said, you talk about this.

Privacy sandbox, can you just walk the listeners through what that means?

Yeah, privacy sandbox is basically Google's umbrella term for all of the privacy advertising solutions they've been developing. So there are measurement solutions for example, which are replacing some of the functionality of the third party cookie. And then there are, there's topics which is enabling contextual advertising on the open web where as we were talking about, publishers can still monetize their content based on contextual or content based affinities, even if they can't track individual users from place to place based on what they've been reading. I mean, you know, the hullabaloo and the digital advertising ecosystem over this is that it's very complex, right? Like if you go to the docs that Google has made available about them, like I've said, I did a PhD in literature and they're very struggle, they're very difficult for me to read, you know. So I think the, the ecosystem's a little mad at Google for holding this change the end of third party cookies over advertisers for you know, three to five years and now for having solutions that are apparently fragmented and complex. But they're going to be a big part of how advertising look.

I would say overall, thematically here, you.

Know, it's just fascinating having been part of the industry when I was, you know, immersed in it, is just how the, the economics of the industry, it's so huge. Like the billions and billions of dollars that flow through these pipes make it so difficult to understand how any of these things that are currently lining the pockets of people going to be just jettisoned away out of the name of, of safety or anything like that. There's always going to be some other clever solution that they have that'll make sure that they end up being able to maintain, you know, the flow that they have on things because they're, you know, they're businesses after all and they want to. So I mean my, my question is we haven't even talked about targeting people in their homes, you know, with IPs and you know, their TVs and you know, smart, smart TVs and connected devices and their WI FI connections in their homes. I mean this is insane. You know, the amount of data that they suck out of people's houses when they're, when they're watching TV on cable. I'm not cable on to through WI FI connections, so I don't know, just personally I think I'm, as you can tell, I'm probably a bit of a cynic and skeptic. I think that there's probably a big cookie of another by another name. You know, they'll call it something else, but it'll essentially do the same thing but a different way. I just think it's just too profitable for them. And also, again, I don't really think personally that people, and I mean consumers, really care about this stuff as much as it's touted in the marketplace, like consumer protections and stuff like that. Certainly it's bad when someone's information is stolen or they get hacked, you know, but those are different issues in my view. I think they're related.

Right.

But they're more just about the fact that we've got our data bucketed in so many different places that eventually one company's leaky faucet is going to be a negative impact on things. But the advertising industry in general, I think people are going to continue to buy things online. They continue to watch content online, they're going to continue to share information online because they want to, you know, and they're going to keep doing it regardless of what tools are out there. And I think the anecdotes of bad stuff that happens to people while they're bad, it's not going to be enough to curtail people's behaviors. I mean, you look at doing, I think it's even worse now than I'm seeing is how much people share online. It's insane, you know. So, anyway, I would want to kind of make sure we come to a conclusion here, because I think what we're discussing, which is really interesting to me, I really appreciate you being here, is the idea that the focus that's been placed on brands in some respects is a distraction.

Right.

That all these things that we're talking about, privacy and attribution and brand safety and content relations and, you know, associative content issues, can be a very easy way for a lot of brands to maybe hold off on being aggressive with the way they talk about them themselves. And you're proposing overall that while these things may be important, nothing's more important than being able to be in the marketplace and letting people know where you stand on things and not letting these things hold you back from the important message of getting yourself in front of people.

Yeah, I think that's a great summary. I think I would put it this way to summarize what we've come up with. Your marketing strategy and philosophy should correspond to the stage you're at in the life cycle of your business. So if you're a big enterprise, you're your category leader and you're in a sort of like wealth or, you know, brand preservation mode, then yeah, you probably want to allocate more dollars to brand safety and you want to be concerned about, you know, that PR hit that again is going to put you on the front page of the Journal and send your stock price down for a few days. The vast majority of companies are not in that position and I think too many of them act like they are. And they should be far more concerned about where they're not showing up and about invisibility than where they are showing up in a lack of supposed safety.

Truly great. So great. So how could people get a hold of you and a little bit more about what you know, your business and you know, the ways in which people can engage with you or listen to you?

Yeah, I'm@sharppenmedia.com or you can Google Joe Zappa, Twitter, Joe Zappa, LinkedIn and you'll find me pretty easily. We really have two types of customers. Some are CEOs, CRO, CMOs who are looking for strategic marketing support partnership on these brand building topics we've been talking about. And the others are tactical. Right. Where they're just looking for smart ad tech content. So if either buckets you, great.

And I think the last question I have, and it might be one that some people are asking, is, are you related to Frank at Dweezil?

I am not. My father claims this, but I always say that he is not to be trusted.

Okay, well, it would be kind of cool if you were. Well, look, I really appreciate this. This is a lot of fun and I think we learned a lot and as expected, it was a really educational conversation for me. So good seeing you.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

You got it. Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO Ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@the crocollective.com. that's the crocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.

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