Private Ad Marketplaces Pave the Way for Post-Cookie Advertising
Private marketplace ad programs (PMPs) are becoming more and more popular with advertisers. In 2020, eMarketer announced that programmatic ad spending on private marketplaces will exceed open exchanges for the foreseeable future. Let that sink in for a minute — the exchanges that have long underpinned the way we way buy digital media are no longer the most popular tactic for media buyers.
Retail Performance Platforms Can Boost Brands in a Cookieless Future
Brands searching for ways to connect, understand, and engage with consumers throughout the omnichannel journey can find an abundance of data through retailer performance platforms that can be impactful, actionable, and measurable in future campaign planning. These platforms can offer onsite (such as sponsored search and display) and offsite (such as digital out-of-home and social media) opportunities for brands to attract shoppers, and these advertisement opportunities can then be measured and analyzed, leading to more valuable interactions.
4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Universal ID
Preparing for a cookieless future means getting on board with Universal IDs — there are many in the space and in the spirit of the open web, you’ll likely be working with a number of them by the end of the year. The choices that you make at this point are important, as these are long-term relationships with meaningful impact on the bottom line. So, be thorough — while there are many Universal IDs to choose from, they’re far from the same. The countdown to the demise of third-party cookies is minutes away from midnight, so start your evaluation now to ensure you don’t rush into a poor decision.
How Privacy Will Change Digital Marketing This Year
The marketing industry finds itself facing the most significant disruption since the inception of digital: privacy changes, especially the end of third-party cookies. Google Chrome is inching closer to Deprecation Day for the third-party cookie, and though we still don’t know exactly when that is, the digital marketing industry is preparing to pivot in fundamental […]
What is Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoCs)?
Federated Learning of Cohorts is a method Google has devised to track Internet users’ interests and serve them ads relevant to those interests. The method aims to be attentive to privacy by grouping thousands of users into these interest-based cohorts. Therefore, the thinking goes, users still see ads relevant to them, but ads less finely […]
Third-Party Data Remains Even as Cookies Deprecate
Third-party cookies are crumbling, but third-party data may be on the rise. Lotame, a data enrichment platform, manages what it calls the “world’s largest second- and third-party data marketplace.” This gives the company among ad tech’s best views into how companies are deploying data and what they’re buying. Lotame found that third-party data sales skyrocketed […]
Digital Advertising’s Big Moves in 2021
2020 was a challenging year for digital advertising, and there’s no reason to think 2021 won’t be as well. The industry is facing several issues, including privacy and cookies, ad tech dominance and ad fraud. And they’re all coming to a head now. With that in mind, here are five big moves I anticipate this […]
As Cookies Crumble, Can Location Data Pick Up the Pieces?
One potential and promising alternative to third-party cookies is location data. Captured from mobile users as they move through the physical world, location data can be used for a range of purposes and personalization.
Real-world visitation patterns offer clues to user identity, brand affinities, and purchase intent. Putting aside that Covid-19 has radically upended movement patterns for the time being, regular airport or hotel visitation can identify business travelers, routine presence in a gym suggests health-consciousness, and weekly fast-food visits implies the opposite. Someone visiting car dealerships is probably an “auto-intender,” and so on.
The One Where Adtech and Martech Get Married
It’s impossible to have any certainty about the de facto cookieless targeting solution of the future or what solutions will emerge from Google’s privacy sandbox. But what is clear is that the ability to precisely target audiences in adtech without cookies will likely have very similar applications for personalization use cases in martech.
In order words, the data used to show a targeted ad to a person without cookies could simultaneously power the way a digital experience is personalized for that same person.
Blocking Third-Party Cookies Will Not Mean the End of Marketing Attribution
The demise of third-party cookies will not mean the end of digital advertising and the ability to assign proper attribution to individuals engaging in various touchpoints along the buyer journey. Several entities are currently hashing out other methodologies brands can leverage to retrieve audience analytics.
Marketing attribution providers will continue to provide reliable data to enterprise marketers on consumers and their customer journeys through the sales funnel. Attribution providers worth their salt will not only make sure they are compliant with the tightened rules around cookies but also ensure their clients are following the letter of the law.
The Cookie’s Collapse is No More Consequential than the Shift to Mobile
The cookie is on its last days, enjoying an extended farewell tour, thanks to Google’s decision to view third-party cookies as obsolete within Chrome by 2022. While many have painted the cookie’s waning days as the potential end of digital advertising, the truth is that this move is really no more consequential than the gradual shift from the desktop web to the mobile device.
Similar to the shift to mobile, the loss of the cookie will change the way that digital media is bought and sold and the way that many companies approach third-party data. It will likely put several companies out of business if they fail to adapt. But this change will merely be a paradigm shift — one that is long overdue — and not the nuclear fallout that many are expecting.
How Realistic is the IAB’s Rearc?
Behind the scenes, at conferences and in meetings, we’re told of solutions for the death of the third-party cookie that will use CNAMEs, Universal IDs, device IDs, IP addresses, or other Rube Goldberg-ian hijinks to create the supposed 1:1 replacement for how marketing was previously done. The bridge from marketing using the third-party cookie to first-party data is as simple as snapping your fingers!
Of course, it won’t be that simple. There will not be a simple replacement for the third-party cookie. In truth, there shouldn’t be. The third-party cookie never worked as well as the industry liked to believe. Third-party data was used to measure the performance of first-party inventory, and attribution was biased toward a last-click model that benefited the triopoly of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. The third-party cookie never really worked in a society that has adopted mobile as a way of life. In a way, it’s time to bid good riddance to a flawed system, albeit one with which we’d all grown comfortable.
CPG Brands Can Navigate a Cookieless World With a Little Help From Their Friends
Ever since Apple announced it was limiting third-party cookies two to three years ago, brands have been working to adapt to a cookieless world. With Google jumping on the bandwagon recently, the pressure to adopt cookieless solutions has intensified.
Here are some of the questions we’ve been fielding from CPG brands about the future of digital advertising — and how marketing technology providers can help.
Google’s SameSite Update and the Third-Party Cookie-Free Future
The end of the third-party cookie forces marketers to take earning consumer consent for data collection more seriously, and it will open up new methods of data collection, some directly devised by Google and others by the many companies in its ecosystem. These new methods of data collection will aim to clarify the impact of ads and allow for pertinent advertising (or targeting) with consumers’ more clearly stated consent.
To obtain an insider’s perspective on marketing tech’s reaction to Google’s SameSite update and the industry’s path forward, I got in touch with Brian Silver, president of email marketing firm LiveIntent.
No Cookies, No Problem: Harnessing the Power of Multi-Dimensional First-Party Data
While many have said that the deprecation of third-party cookies and tracking mechanisms will have a negative impact on personalized marketing, the fact is that this has finally opened the door to a much more effective approach: making full use of the richness of available first-party data.