It’s the end of the third-party cookie as we know it. Undoubtedly, Google is priming new strategies including the launch of FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). But what is FLoC exactly, and how does it stack up to third-party cookies? Today’s guest has some answers.
Nick Jordan is the Founder of Narrative I/O, a data streaming platform that simplifies the buying and selling of information by eliminating the inefficiencies in data transactions. Their goal is to fuel cutting-edge data strategies, monetize valuable data assets, and power innovation and growth. With a background in computer science and broad experience in product management, Nick worked for some of the world’s largest technology companies, Adobe and Yahoo.
“One of my superpowers has always been able to sort of bridge between the business and the technology side. And I think as you think of data, as a subset of technology, that’s become incredibly important to my career path,” says our guest.
In this episode of the Identity Revolution podcast, our host Cory Davis and guest Nick Jordan talk about the post-cookie era, the future of data collection, and Google’s new technology advancements.
“The browser will store all of the data that historically might have been stored with the advertisers, the publishers, or technology companies. But the browser becomes the database that stores all of the information about the user. And you can write to that database as an advertiser, as a publisher, or as a technology company, but you can’t lead from that database. You can’t say, what are all the pieces of data we’ve collected about this user?”
According to Nick, FLoC could change the landscape as we know by not allowing anyone else but Google to set the rules.
“There’s uncertainty, and people don’t like uncertainty, but I would largely say stay the course. And any changes that happen are going to happen over time. And there will largely be solutions to those changes.”
How he started Narrative I/O to solve his own problem
“I think most decisions in humanity are driven around humans being inherently lazy. I said, ‘Certainly, someone has solved this problem, and I’m going to find that solution because I need it.’ And unfortunately, no such solution existed in the form that I was looking for it.
And then, I started Narrative to help solve that problem. So I went from trying to be lazy to doing what is arguably the least intelligent thing to do if you want to be lazy, which is start a company.”
The future of leveraging data and how it can go beyond marketing and advertising
“So it is predominantly marketing and advertising today, although it was meant to be general-purpose. And we have a product launch in Q2 of 2021. In the next couple of months, that’s gonna allow the platform to be used for any dataset.
And so we started with marketing and advertising use cases for a couple of reasons. It was my background, so it was a space I understood well. There was a ton of both buy-side and sell-side demand within that market. You could argue that the advertising industry is always on the leading edge of how data is leveraged.”
Google’s FLoC could create anti-competitive rules for everyone, including the ad tech industry
“If I’m a clever data scientist and I think there’s a better way to build those cohorts or think there’s a better solution than cohorts themselves, there’s not a mechanism by which I can implement that because everything happens within the browser. And so to me, and this is true with a lot of the privacy-related stuff that happens around Ad Tech is you almost get into an anti-competitive landscape, which has its own legal problems for the people that are implementing it. And I think this extends beyond FLoC and the data ecosystem.”
[3:14] “We ultimately chose the term data streaming platform because we see what we do very similar to what Spotify or Netflix does around content. We’re trying to do the same thing around data.”
[04:28] “We think data is incredibly important to the modern enterprise. We think it’s only getting more important as our technologies get more sophisticated.”
[9:50] “The thing that struck out to me that I don’t think I had fully appreciated before I went through the exercise is how much it ends the ability for anyone to innovate. It’s Google that is creating the rules about what the browser does. And maybe even more importantly, the rules around the math of how the cohorts are created.”
