For many years, cookies have been an essential
component of digital marketing activations.
Cookies have allowed brands to leverage powerful
tactics across their media plans, from retargeting user
profiles based on interactions (e.g., site visit, click on
banner, abandoned cart) to extending their audiences
through lookalike modelling. The open and standardised
nature of cookies has also enabled many MarTech
players to thrive, creating a large choice of solutions for
advertisers.
Although the current deprecation of third-party cookies
undeniably disrupts how brands engage with audiences
online, alternatives are emerging.
Dentsu’s global leadership in search marketing has
enabled us to develop a unique understanding of
successful cookieless activation use cases over the
years. We can uniquely apply these insights to all other
forms of digital marketing going forward.
Cookieless audience-driven targeting solutions
The end of third-party cookies does not mean the end
of audience-based targeting. Tech platforms, publishers
and marketing solutions providers are actively
developing cookieless audience-based options.
Closed ecosystems: Large platforms like Facebook
and Amazon control the digital experience for users
and brands in closed ecosystems, wherein they use
exclusive audience data on signed-in users to
personalise ads. For advertisers, these ecosystems are
appealing because they offer a means to tap into this
accurate and unique user data, and even match
advertiser first-party data with tech platforms to
enhance personalisation and targeting. In a cookieless
world, it seems the large tech platforms will continue to
thrive in the marketplace, while smaller publishers and
platforms may lose their influence.
Publisher first-party data: While platforms like
Facebook and Amazon identify users via Personal
Identifiable Information (PII) such as email address,
most alternative publisher platforms still rely on
cookie-based technology to identify users and monetise
their advertising inventory. As they are now trying to
move away from their cookie dependency, many pivot
from an open access approach to a partially or totally
locked environment (i.e., asking the user to log in to
start browsing the website). For users, this pivot
represents a major user experience evolution (unlike
closed ecosystems where the experience is generally
frictionless or expected), and it is yet to see whether
people who log in to their favourite social and shopping
platforms will be equally willing to log in to their local
newspaper website. If they do, this will open new doors
for data partnerships between publishers and
advertisers.
Unique and Shared Identity Solutions (IDs):
Unlike publishers, many advertisers have already
invested in CRM solutions to secure relevant customer
information. Their challenge now is to connect this
information to identify users across environments -
without relying on cookies. This need for a shared ID
solution stems from each CRM solution acting in a silo:
even if it could be possible to rely on hashed user lists
(e.g., phone number), those solutions assume that the
same user is using the same phone number to access
both environments. To avoid any possible data loss
during this exchange, advertisers have started
conversations with publishers about setting up trusted
second-party data exchange. This interesting approach
could be valuable in the mid/long term, although it is
susceptible to the same privacy compliance issues
currently encountered by the use of second-party data
(i.e., appropriate user consents need to be obtained by
the party that collected the data, in order for that data
to then be shared with another "unknown" party for its
marketing activities). Some of these solutions
therefore seem to be more advertising-centric than
user-privacy focused, which presents the risk of simply
recreating the issues around cookies in a new form. It
is thus crucial to keep users at the centre and build the
solution around their expectations and preferences.
Contextual Targeting. Focusing on the type of content
people consume rather than a specific audience type is
nothing new. The concept of Google Search is by nature,
contextual. However, more broadly across wider
ecosystems like display and programmatic tactics, as the
Natural Language Processing technology powering
contextual targeting becomes more sophisticated, new
applications emerge, from fuelling strategic thinking to
informing content development, to ultimately activating.
To find more information on this topic download the dentsu report The Cookieless World - A Guide for the New Era of Digital Marketing