The long-anticipated phase-out of third-party cookies by Google on its Chrome browser, which covers the most significant part of both the global and local markets, has prompted media houses to find and test data management platform (DMP) solutions.

The Croatian digital publishing industry faced a dilemma: All global DMPs were too expensive compared to the industry’s purchasing power. But with the demise of third-party cookies looming, news publishers could not afford to operate daily without a DMP.

24sata, the largest multi-platform media brand in Croatia, which includes the brands 24sata, JoomBoos, Express, and the miss7 group, began searching for a solution to this problem last year.

Searching for segmentation

To minimise the negative impact on open market revenues caused by the elimination of third-party cookies, Dragan Jeličić, former director of development and performance department at 24sata, said they needed a DMP capable of automatically segmenting users for the Croatian-speaking area according to IAB Audience taxonomy.

The solution was found with the DeFractal DMP, which offers a plug-and-play solution linked with the Google Ad Manager ad server.

“This ensures over 400 standard user segments classified by IAB classification are directly propagated into publisher-provided signals, sellers-defined audience, and become available to buyers for programmatic advertising,” Jeličić said.

The company uses the same segments in traditional leasing (direct sales).

In addition to managing first-party data, it offers built-in functionalities such as Ad Refresh, which provides an additional opportunity to increase the volume of visible inventory and additional earnings from the open market.

Sharing audiences

The platform has a whole team of AI assistants that function as the DMP team and help maximise its use.

One of the platform’s advantages is sharing audiences from one domain to another based on a statistical model. This has led to conducting tests that could not be done before; we finally have a solution that can utilise audience segments from our other brands to uplift the results for our direct sale clients. We have been testing different segments from our other brands, and the results are promising.

This could lead to the development of new direct sales products based only on the data we can now use to deliver better results for our clients.

Another use case is to better identify user segments at 24sata. For example, using the “Quiz” option to create a quiz about a specific topic and automatically pushing the data of people who answer the question to the relevant segment engages readers relevant to the topic and gathers better data for your segments.

Zoran Turković, CEO of 24sata, said the company used different DMP platforms in the past which somewhat met their needs, but the price was high and the customer service response time was poor. 

Our advice for any news company looking for a DMP is to take your time and look for a partner. Third-party cookie deprecation brings many uncertainties, but finding a partner who can navigate you through that and find a product you can fully utilise is a key step. We immediately saw value in utilising segments from our other brands and tried to build a product around that so we could offer it to our clients.

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