The imminent removal of third-party cookies in Chrome and Apple’s IDFA identifier leaves brands who rely on them in need of alternatives.
THINK PRIVACY-FIRST
A complex ecosystem of websites, apps, social media companies, data brokers, and ad-tech tracks people, harvesting their personal data. This data is then pieced together, shared and used to target billions of advertising spend.
As the Firefox and Safari browsers already do, Google is removing the ability to use thirdparty cookies. At the same time, the Apple release of iOS 14 brings in privacy features that give people far greater control over how their data is collected and used.
These changes benefit us as consumers. We’ll no longer leave a data trail with every browse that unknown parties can use at will. We get transparency, understanding and control over the data we volunteer and behaviourally leave on apps and websites.
For digital publishers, whose business model is to sell ads using third-party cookies to brands to fund their content, this poses a significant threat to future revenues.
For ad-tech DSPs, who will be without a swathe of third-party data, there is still hope. They already offer many other useful targeting attributes, such as safelists, contextual categories, locations, time-of-day and day-of-week.
For brands who buy this digital inventory in pursuit of brand growth, traffic and conversion, your reach may initially fall, your ability to precisely target and retarget, will diminish, and your means of measurement will falter.
With multiple workarounds such as Trade Desk’s Unified ID or LiveRamp’s ATS and the effectiveness of Google’s proposed alternative, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) yet to be proven, plus questions over it’s chances of meeting European GDPR regulations, it’s on brands themselves to change as they see fit, to develop new ways to prospect, nurture and market.
For six pieces of advice to adapting to a cookieless world, download the full piece below.
