Six sunny days on the Croisette, two TRUSTX-hosted conversations, and a lot of takeaways. For anyone who couldn’t join us at Programmatic Secrets, Lies and Disruption on Monday or Next-Gen Privacy and Data Protectionon Wednesday — here’s the short version.
Programmatic Secrets, Lies and Disruption
The morning of June 19th, the ANA released its long-awaited Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study. The headline number landed hard: across 21 participating companies, $123M in ad spend, and 35.5B impressions, the average campaign ran on 44,000 websites — and Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites swallowed 21% of impressions and 15% of spend. That’s roughly $20M of outright waste in a single test. Apply that ratio to the real world and the number becomes painful.
ANA President Bob Liodice opened the session. Lou Paskalis, Tom Triscari, AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff, and TRUSTX CEO David Kohl took the stage and laid out three steps any marketer can take this week:
1. Run on an inclusion list.Buy only from domains you’ve explicitly approved. Exclusion lists feel comprehensive and aren’t. Running clean media with an exclusion list is like counting grains of sand on a beach.
2. Buy direct paths.Brand → DSP → SSP → Publisher. Every reseller hop adds cost and increases the odds you’re not getting what you think you’re buying. Confirm the impression is on the publisher domain itself, not an MFA tile served inside it.
3. Demand log-level data.Ask for the evidence that your money landed where you said it should. If a partner can’t (or won’t) provide it, take your spend elsewhere.
Next-Gen Privacy & Data Protection: Learning from the Sins of the Past
Over at l’Hôtel Barrière Le Gray d’Albion, we partnered with HUMAN Security on a frank conversation about identity, privacy, and data security. David Kohl, Raptive’s Paul Bannister, and Freewheel’s David Dworin lined up against four uncomfortable truths, with HUMAN’s Kristine Lopez moderating.
Third-party cookie deprecation isn’t the beginning of the end — it’s the end of the beginning. Cookies were past their sell-by date long before regulators forced the conversation. CTV — the fastest-growing platform — never used them in the first place.
1:1 was always a myth.The data was never that accurate. iOS users (about half the US audience) are functionally invisible. We’ve been buying scale and calling it precision.
Alternative IDs are lipstick on a pig.Email addresses and phone numbers are more persistent and more personal than any cookie. Encryption doesn’t make a leaky bidstream safe — it just makes the leak feel sophisticated.
Cohorts deserve a chance.Separate identity from audience. Build deterministically-matched groups from each party’s first-party data. Target, cap, measure — all at the cohort level — and keep personal data away from every intermediary in the supply chain.
Cookies were built to remember a shopping cart, not to underwrite an entire ecosystem. We built the ecosystem on top of them anyway. The good news: better alternatives are within reach, and conversations like Cannes were where they start.
Originally published on trustx.org.