What Do Cookies Have To Do With TV? Truthset’s Chip Russo Explains It to a Teenager

I went to a panel where a bunch of companies were talking about data and how much they know about people, then they started talking about cookies and abolishing cookies and I was super confused. Why are these people obsessed with cookies? What does that have to do with who a person is and their identity? Then they were talking about maids– which was weird. 

Then after the panel I met with Chip Russo, the President and Chief Revenue Officer at Truthset, and he explained what his company does, how they work, and why they are talking about cookies.

I still have a lot to understand here but here is the interview and some takeaways:

What's interesting about Truthset?

Truthset is a data intelligence company that essentially takes data across the internet and other places, more specifically user data, and finds out how accurate that information is. 

As an example for TV advertising, if I consistently have accounts as a 15-year-old male, but some accounts may have me down as a 25-year-old female for some weird reason, some advertisers would send me ads for women and some would be for me. But if the advertisers or TV networks use Truthset they can detect that and rate the data based on how accurate it is and then they can give me personalized ads for a 15-year-old male, not for a 25-year-old female.

When Truthset measures the data accuracy they can separate the accurate or “good” data from the inaccurate or “bad” data. This allows other companies to understand who in their audience they are reaching, and who they should try to target more and reach. 

What I like about Chip’s message:

Chip’s message was to essentially, make sure the data you have is correct so you can use it effectively to market your product to the right people. When you do that your return on investment may increase because you are marketing to the right people, instead of a shot in the dark. 

I was very confused on the topic and even though I am still a little confused I know a lot more about data personalization and how marketers can use good and accurate data for good and accurate marketing. 

RIO: So they're talking about running out of cookies, and how the cookie system is failing, and they got cookies on the table over there. If we're running out, why are we giving them all away? We should hoard them up. They're talking about how they want to abolish cookies. Would Oreos be considered a cookie, though? 

Transcript:

RIO: What does your business do? What is your company?

CHIP: So what we do is we look at data and we measure for accuracy. So we've built a tool that allows us to measure data accuracy, validate it for transparency for the whole data ecosystem.

RIO: And in your panel, some people mentioned the sky is falling, and something about cookies being sort of destroyed or not existing. What do you mean by that?

CHIP: Yeah, so the whole data ecosystem is run off of a couple identifiers. One of them is called a cookie, that's how, you know, if you've gone to a certain website, and then all of a sudden, it reappears in an advertisement on the next page that you go to. That's called a cookie technology and then the mobile ad front of that is called a MAID, a mobile ID. So that's what MAID stands for. So Google is deprecating both of those two things, which really run pretty much the entire data ecosystem right now or a lot of it. And everyone's trying to figure out, okay, well, how are we going to identify people? So throughout the week, you might hear a lot of conversation around identity and what's happening with identity. 

And that's essentially like, who are the people that we're reaching? Right? Who's coming to our website? Who's buying our product? And how do we give them the best experience we can, right? 

If you've been on Instagram or something, and you've gotten really good ads and things that you're like you might purchase? That's because they really have a good understanding of who you are, your identity, right? And they're using authenticated users to do that they're using your web, your email address, right, you've logged in to Facebook, or you've logged into Instagram, so they know who you are. 

And they're taking action and trying to give you the best ad that's most effective for you.

RIO: Okay, yeah. Yeah. And then my final question is, what is your message to the marketers out there? Do you have a message? 

CHIP: Sure. Well to marketers directly, you know, we talked about the deprecation of cookies and MAIDs. It's now time to really be focused on your first-party data. Totally understanding who your consumer is. And what happens when you go through that process is you realize you have a ton of data, but you need to make sure it's accurate.

So you should institute data governance practices, even things that can be brought up be measured by your board on a quarterly basis. How good is your data? How can you improve it over time? And when you enrich it with great third-party partners? How do you make sure that that full profile of your audiences is accurate as possible, so when you do modeling, or you do advertising, they get the best experience they can, and you get the best ROI that you can.

RIO: All right. Yeah. Thank you. And when would you like a cookie?

CHIP: No, thank you.

RIO: Thank you for talking to us. I appreciate your time. Thank you.