Impact – 1
All the recent changes are going to dramatically change the relationships between brands and their present and future customers. There has been a lot of commentary about the impact of these changes.
The Drum: “Third-party cookies have been integral for digital marketing over the last 10 years and their reach covers everything from audience targeting to behaviour tracking to remarketing and more. However, with searches for “online privacy” at an all-time high and this being a key concern for people around the world, the old method of collecting behavioural data as we browse needs to change and that’s why Google will be depreciating cookie…For marketers, the key challenge will be to strike the right balance between having the necessary privacy and security in place while delivering a customised user experience.”
Mark Bergen: “Mobile advertising inside apps is a sizable business, and Apple’s move has the potential to gut the sector. Companies that rely on these ads for sales or growth have warned investors of coming damage, particularly as Apple’s iOS mobile operating system typically brings in more money for developers than Android. Then there are the wealth of ad agencies, ad-tech firms and data brokers that thrive on web cookies. Bank of America research estimated Apple’s change could shave as much as 3% off Facebook’s revenue. Google’s upcoming move offers less certainty. Executives at Criteo SA, an ad re-targeting firm, told investors they were working with Google to prepare for FLoC, but weren’t yet sure of the financial impact.”
ET Brand Equity: “Marketers need to find alternative ways to increase digital fingerprints across different devices, since the role of cookies is gradually decreasing. Neil Patel, entrepreneur, angel investor and digital marketing expert, said that companies are looking for solutions to get enough information about users even without cookies, using customer data platforms…He said, “Customer data platforms are great because you can learn all about your customers in one platform. It is similar in many aspects to CRM, but more so for customer data.””
Dr. Augustine Fou in Forbes: “The moves by Google and Apple increase privacy for consumers. That’s a good thing, after years of wanton data collection by ad tech companies, violating consumers’ privacy without their knowledge, consent or recourse…Ad tech companies are arguing that the loss of 3P cookies is a bad thing because that means the loss of the ability to target ads down to the level of the individual. What they are really saying is that it impairs their ability to make revenue selling services based on 3P cookies, like audience segments, behavioral targeting, etc. Marketers should consider whether targeting down to the level of the individual is actually worth it or actually works in the first place, given how poor the data quality is… When all of the useless and harmful things built on 3P cookies go away, the associated costs go down and the effective business outcomes from digital marketing go back up. More specifically, when advertisers buy ads from real publishers with real human audiences, they will get better outcomes than hyper targeted ads shown on millions of long tail sites to bots, pretending to be various audiences.”
WSJ on FLoC: “The idea behind FLoC, one of a handful of advertiser tools that Google is proposing, is to allow advertisers to request and use pools of online identities with common characteristics, rather than individuals. The underlying data will come from browsers that use machine learning to develop cohorts based in part on the sites that individuals visit. Advertisers will receive an identifier for a cohort rather than for the individuals within it.”
