Marketing: Disrupted and Simplified (Part 9)

Impact – 3

Technology Review: “Third-party cookies are like Cretaceous dinosaurs. They’re munching away on consumers’ data while asteroids lobbed by Google, Mozilla, Apple, and others are on the brink of obliterating the current marketing ecosystem. Google is planning to phase out these online tracking tools by 2022. For its part, Apple plans to make its mobile device ID—known as identifier for advertisers, or IDFA—opt-in only: a move that will prevent cross-application tracking of site visitors. Their plans are only two examples of a far broader pivot toward consumer privacy that’s also been manifested in expansive pro-privacy laws such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act… “Brands must now shift the focus to first-party data strategies to effectively personalize experiences across the customer journey,” says Amit Ahuja, vice president for Experience Cloud product and strategy at Adobe…Companies need to maximize the value of first-party data: the data collected from their own domains about customers.”

Ravi Ganesh & Lloyd Mathias: “The end of browser-based third-party cookies also means that campaign planning, targeting, optimization and measurement are affected. The move signifies the death of re-targeting and lookalike marketing as practised today. Cost-per- impression-based buying will transition to cost-per-click/engagement-based buying. Walled gardens such as Google will only provide attribution within their publishing domain. Businesses need to evolve mechanisms to measure their marketing campaigns to be able to determine omni-channel effectiveness. With less than eight months left for the purge of third-party cookies and a rapidly evolving regulatory framework, businesses need to be ready to implement privacy-by-design in their marketing efforts. A sharp focus on first-party data and on contextual advertising is imminent. Time is running out and many businesses have yet to wake up to this reality.”

Ron Jacobs: “First-party data is relevant and accurate because it provides brands with data about their existing prospects and customers, and allows a marketer to create highly personalized experiences. As many as 80% of marketers plan to increase their use of internal first-party data over the 12 months…When people have actively given information to a marketer to use, the consent is clear enough — consumers expect it will be used to make ads and personalization contextually better. But consent is important. Look at what Apple is doing: Instead of just having mobile ad IDs tracking you, you have to opt in…First-party data is easily applied to email. But the digital display guys aren’t talking to the email and direct mail people — they’re on their own islands. People have to collaborate.”

AdExchanger: “CDP data is unified at the person-level, using PII. Pseudonymous IDs can be attached to this profile, of course, but there has to be a profile in the first place. A CDP using only pseudonymous IDs is basically a DMP. To work with media in the future, CDPs will need to link PII with media IDs. Post-cookie, these media IDs may well be FLoCs and “interest groups.” That linkage shouldn’t be difficult: a person visits a site and – if they log in or have a first-party cookie ID already – the first-party ID and the users’ various interest group labels are retrieved from the browser and joined.”

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Rajesh Jain

An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.