Solving the advertising reach crisis

The deprecation of third-party cookies, combined with heightened privacy restrictions from Google and Apple, has left programmatic advertising unable to deliver its promised scale – advertisers currently reach only 30% of audiences on the open web, while publishers are already facing severe revenue losses. Attempts to replace cookies with fingerprinting or email-based identifiers either lack privacy compliance or scale, making them unsustainable. Instead, advertisers and publishers must embrace direct partnerships built on first-party data, which enables intelligent audience modelling and expanded reach while respecting privacy.

Publishers hold valuable contextual, declared, and behavioural signals that advertisers can leverage to address the 70% of unreachable audiences, as seen in examples from Hershey’s pivot to private marketplaces and PMC’s first-party data strategy, which has driven 5x performance improvements. The future of digital advertising depends on closer collaboration between brands and publishers to unlock scale, transparency, and effectiveness in a privacy-first ecosystem. Read more in this Advertising Week article here.