Coca-Cola wants to grow its first-party data and invest in an industry-wide unified audience ID in anticipation of a move beyond third-party cookie-tracking.
The soft-drinks giant joined a host of agency and adtech experts at ATS Singapore on Monday in calling for the industry to agree on a common "identity" for online audiences – a move that will bring greater consistency to media planning and protect the future of the open internet.
"We need to figure out a unified solution across the whole landscape – that is where the independent market can survive," Vidyarth Eluppai Srivatsan, Asia-Pacific marketing technologies leader at Coca-Cola, said. "Otherwise there is going to be status quo with all walled gardens. That is where we want to invest strategically."
Ravi Shankar, data and technology lead for Asia-Pacific at Omnicom Media Group's Annalect, agreed: "As an industry, we need to create a common solution which will help industry in value exchange and drive efficiency."
"If we don’t come together as an industry, there's going to be more acquisitions, more companies perishing," Sunil Naryani, regional general manager of programmatic and paid media at Dentsu Aegis Network, added.
Such an initiative must be led by a neutral party such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry’s trade body, the panel agreed.
"It cannot be led by one adtech vendor or publisher, it has to be a group coming together," Shankar said.
The IAB Tech Lab has already made moves in this space. Last year, it bought DigiTrust, a membership-based, not-for-profit initiative that offers a standardised identifier for ad-targeting.
This is in addition to The Trade Desk’s Unified ID Solution and the Advertising ID Consortium, which last year lost some significant backers.
However, these initiatives are led by the US and have not as of yet spread to Asia-Pacific, a market that has vastly different requirements, according to Colleen Ngo, vice-president of partnerships and investment, Asia-Pacific, at Xaxis.
"There is a lot of effort being put into the industry trying to create a single profile of users. However, we are still not talking to each other as much as we should," Ngo said. "In APAC especially, no-one has tapped into it or had that conversation so we can collectively identify a user under the same definitions."
