Slate boosts cookieless CPMs by 138% with Criteo’s hashed email solutions

Slate is an online magazine and podcast network focused on news, politics, technology, and culture.

Like almost all publishers and media owners, Slate has faced challenges due to the shifting consumer privacy landscape, despite deploying a logged-in site strategy. With the third-party cookie being deprecated in desktop browsers like Safari and Firefox, along with restrictions to mobile device ID sharing, maintaining addressability to protect programmatic revenues became a top priority.

Leveraging Criteo’s hashed email identification solutions, Slate was able to recapture CPMs in cookie-compromised environments—and build a secure foundation for the cookieless future.

Hashed emails amplify outcomes

Slate’s partnership with Criteo began with a simple challenge: to safeguard the ability to monetize users in environments without identifiers such as third-party cookies or IDFAs.

By updating their Prebid configuration to include 15 simple lines of JavaScript, Slate began securely sharing hashed emails of logged-in users to enable targeting across Criteo’s network of first-party demand without the need for third-party identifiers. This enabled a scalable addressability solution for demand-side partners without the risk of exposing valuable data or involving intermediaries. Slate could monetize users safely, with the knowledge that their data wasn’t being stored or used by others—and was contributing incremental revenue. The results really spoke for themselves.

After enabling hashed emails as a targeting signal for Slate’s authenticated, logged-in users, the team saw an immediate lift of 138% in CPMs for Safari browser traffic. This lift contributed to a year-on-year increase of 70% in spend when comparing January 2022 to January 2023. In addition to this boost in revenue, Slate also realized a user match rate of 83%—no small feat in a cookieless environment.

Future-proofing addressability

Thanks to the integration of Criteo’s hashed email solution, the Slate team is confident that they’ll be able to protect programmatic revenues in a changing privacy landscape.

Molly Gallagher, Senior Manager, Programmatic Revenue at Slate, said, “We partnered with Criteo to monetize our inventory more effectively in cookieless environments. We are thrilled with this progress and will continue to work together with strategic partners like Criteo to navigate the future state of high-value, personalized advertising.”

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