How Hearst Magazines is maintaining signal strength amid the shift from deterministic to probabilistic modeling

In July, when Google announced its decision not to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by default, publishers were faced with reevaluating their post-cookie plans in light of a post-cookie landscape not necessarily being guaranteed. Hearst Magazines was among those publishers, having introduced its first-party targeting tool Aura a month prior.

“We paused for about five minutes [after Google’s announcement], and we just said, ‘Oh.’ But the plans were in place, and we were already on the path of a first-party targeting tool. I mean, we all believe this is the right thing for us,” said Jen Dorre, svp of ad products and data at Hearst Magazines, on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, on Sept. 24.

Rather than reverse course as Google has done, Hearst Magazines has pressed on with its post-cookie plans – and now with the benefit of those plans not needing to be entirely post-cookie.

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