Omnicom Media Group signs on to Teads’ cookieless targeting tech

Omnicom Media Group (OMG) is teaming up with Teads to prepare for the cookieless future.   

The media agency group is using Teads’ cookieless ad targeting tool, called Cookieless Translator, to continue to target audiences while preserving consumer privacy, the companies said on Wednesday.

Cookieless Translator uses AI to analyze online behavioral signals and publicly available information to generate audience profiles that don’t rely on a specific identifier, said Rémi Cackel, chief data officer at Teads.  

OMG will integrate the Cookieless Translator into Omni, its homegrown data platform that enables ad targeting and measurement. OMG declined to name clients working with the tool but said it is testing it with a handful. 

Cookieless Translator will enable OMG to offer audience-based advertising at scale as cookie-based signals start to disappear, said Clarissa Season, chief enablement officer at Annalect. The tool is also helpful because it allows the agency to measure how cookieless segments match up against prior cookie-based segments.

“We can create an audience using traditional methodology, but [the tool] can translate that audience into a cookieless environment and we can test it to make sure that they are equally effective,” she said.

OMG and its data unit, Annalect, have been investing heavily in cookieless targeting technology to preserve audience-based advertising after cookies phase out. One such solution is clean rooms, which allow brands to match their first-party data with publishers and other advertisers in a privacy-compliant way. OMG has already started working heavily with Facebook in this capacity as well as Google’s clean room, Ads Data Hub.

Advertisers are searching for new solutions to audience targeting, as Google and Apple phase out one-to-one identifiers. While Google offered a reprieve by extending the use of cookies on its Chrome browser through 2022, agencies are starting to invest in long-term alternatives.

Other solutions, such as The Trade Desk Unified ID and Google’s FLoC technology, are still in development and face challenges. Unified ID relies on data from publishers, for example, many of which are hesitant to share their data for fear of misuse. Teads’ Cackel also noted that while Unified ID uses email logins on publisher pages to identify and track users, many publishers haven't adopted a login system yet.