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
