Marketers Turn to Creative to Fill Advertising Gap Left by Personal Data

The data privacy movement has triggered a massive shift in digital advertising away from the use of personally identifiable information to serve consumers targeted ads. But if advertisers are not depending on customer information to drive effective campaigns, what will fill the gap?

One X factor could be the strength of creative. Marketers concerned about the loss of tracking driven by the deprecation of IDs such as the third-party cookie and mobile identifiers are 84% more likely to prioritize immersive creative formats such as AR, according to a survey of 400 US marketers by Emodo.

One immersive creative format advertisers are likely to explore is AR.

“As the industry becomes more privacy-centric, we’re seeing a real creative renaissance,” said Jake Moskowitz​, Head of the Emodo Institute & Emodo’s VP of Data Strategy. “AR ads, with the level of scale possible today and with the ability for consumers to self-personalize their own experience even without ID-based targeting, are becoming integral to privacy-forward campaigns.” 

As Moskowitz suggests, the benefit of AR advertising in the privacy era is that it allows consumers to experiment and create their own experiences by overlaying graphics onto the world around them. This could fill some of the creativity and engagement gap left by ads that used to proactively incorporate information about the consumer and their environment based on tracking data.

Another technology to which marketers are likely to turn is dynamic creative optimization. This is the process of tailoring an ad to a consumer in the moment based on data signals. Emodo found that 85% of users say DCO has driven “substantially better results” versus non-DCO ads. 

On the one hand, DCO, like personalization in general, will get harder with IDs going away or getting less effective. It’s harder to optimize creative for a user that an algorithm knows little to nothing about. But marketers will use new forms of DCO that optimize creative based on only in-app behavior to drive personalized experiences. This is relatively privacy-proof because most ID deprecation relates to cross-app and cross-site tracking.

Emodo points out that another hot topic of interest is native advertising. Contextual advertising has surged back as advertisers seek to match the content of their ads to the content of users’ online experiences (instead of matching ads to people based on tracking).

Native advertising could enjoy a similar comeback as advertisers try to design more effective spots by integrating their content seamlessly into that of the publishers their prospective customers enjoy.

“Native ads can be effective even in scenarios in which tracking data isn’t available,” Moskowitz said. “Particularly in privacy-sensitive ad environments, native can feel like a less intrusive way to ask consumers for their attention.”