Sports publisher Footballco has unveiled its in-house solution to the problem of targeting ads once third-party cookies are deprecated on Google Chrome.
Described by Footballco as an “audience segmentation and targeting solution”, FC Precision creates profiles of the publisher’s readers using both first and third-party data.
Footballco says it has already been using FC Precision for certain clients and is now offering the tool to its entire customer base.
Footballco: FC Precision creates audience segments ‘beyond football’
Third-party cookies on Google Chrome, the web browser used by the majority of people online, are scheduled to be phased out in early 2025, although that date has been postponed repeatedly.
This has left many publishers searching for new ways to identify their readers so they can sell space to advertisers who want to target specific audiences.
Footballco’s FC Precision has been rolled out across its video platform FC Player and its website Goal, which Footballco says reaches “more than 80 million fans a month” and generates more than a billion social video views each month.
The company said the tool combines “data sources such as Footballco ID, behavioural data, declared data, lookalike profiling and survey feedback with in-house customised segmentation”. Footballco ID is a first-party identifier assigned to users who opt-in when using the publisher’s services.
The resulting information, Footballco said, produces audience segmentation that goes “beyond football to include interests such as travel, gaming, fashion, technology, and film”.
Vanessa Horgan, Footballco’s senior vice president of revenue operations, said: “We recognise that football fans are not one dimensional, especially when operating at the scale that we do. So it’s vital that our partners can reach not only football fans at scale but also target their varied interests outside of football.
“By tying behavioural, inferred and declared data points to our audiences, we are able to offer bespoke, performative, addressable audiences and richer insights to our clients and agencies across the lifecycle of a campaign.”
Footballco said it will eventually roll out FC Precision for its international brands Kooora, Voetbalzone, Spox and Calciomercato.
Chris Austin, the company’s senior vice president of data, insight and growth, said the tool had “already delivered business, travel and gaming audiences for clients with more custom solutions underway.
“This is underpinned by the huge scale of the audience Footballco serves combined with the unique data we collect – we have approaching one billion Footballco IDs.
“This wealth of data and insight means we’re in a great position now or whenever Google decides is the right time to remove third-party cookies”.
Google has already turned off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users in order to test its proposed alternative targeting technology, Google Sandbox. It is unclear, however, whether Sandbox will replace all the revenue lost when cookies are turned off: Press Gazette has previously reported the new tool could return 60% less online ad income compared with cookies.
Footballco is not the first publisher to respond to the uncertainty by creating its own tools. Reach told Press Gazette earlier this year that it would cope with the deprecation of cookies on Chrome by boosting its collection of first-party data, using industry ID and cookie-less solutions and with contextual advertising, which places ads based on the content of a page rather than the attributes of the reader.
The Guardian rolled out its contextual advertising tool, Guardian Light, in November, and has since added language on its cookie consent banners informing readers that the website is financially supported by readers opting-in to tracking.
[Read more: ‘What if Vanity Fair and ESPN FC had a baby?’ Footballco sets out US ambitions]
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