If you believe the rumors, digital marketers are mourning the death of the cookie. The picture isn't quite so simple – or so bleak – says Matt Garisch from The Croc
With major web browsers blocking third-party cookies, digital marketers are forced to adopt new tactics and become better at how we engage with our audiences
For years now, I have started to look forward to the latest "travesty" or revolutionary change that will befall marketers at the start of each year. Let’s not kid ourselves: we all like a bit of drama. But when the dust settles and the issue (whatever it happens to be that month) is adequately understood, the industry survives and is most likely better off.
This time round I’m talking about the world of cookies or rather, the lack thereof. Why? Well with Chrome, Safari, Brave, and Firefox no longer threatening but eradicating cookies almost entirely in the next couple of years, people are saying the end of digital advertising is nigh. Wrong! Don't believe the hype. Yes, we will have to change our habits, and yes, some things will no longer be possible, but there will always be one constant: there is no substitute for great advertising that has context, relevance, and creativity.
What are cookies? Cookies are necessary. In reality, they are just a bit of information that passes back and forth between web servers and your web browser when you visit websites. First-party cookies (from the site you are visiting) enable you to quickly log in and keep track of your shopping trolley or the articles you have already read. Without the cookies, you'd be treated like a perpetual first-time visitor.
These are cookies generated by websites that you are not currently visiting. In other words, they're owned by the advertising companies placing adverts on the site you're browsing.
Enter the 'bad boys' of the digital world. At first, the arrival of data management platforms (DMPs) was great news. They enabled us to combine first, second and third-party data to provide consistent and repeatable experiences across multiple marketing channels. Hooray!
However, they also increased marketers' power to track consumer behaviour throughout the media mix (after you got cookie'd). They can tell what you were browsing when you saw their advert, what you searched for, and what ultimately encouraged you to go to their page. It also enables them to track whether you went to their homepage several days after seeing their advert, allowing them to attribute your visit to those previous adverts you saw. So far so reasonable, with the risk of verging into creepy territory.
Information like this also helps brands make predictions on your future actions leveraging their 1st party data and purchase additional 3rd party data to supplement what they already know about you. Doing this enables marketers to personalize your experience(advertising) with messaging that has context, relevance and eerily well-timed. In a nutshell, marketers can purchase third-party data or consumer data collected by other companies' or publishers' cookies via DMP's. This enables them to know your browsing history better than you do. Firmly in the realms of creepy, stalker-like behaviour now.
For many, that’s where things become problematic. Somewhere along the way, anti-cookie feeling (and data privacy concerns more generally) reached critical mass. It was only a matter of time before the backlash. Cue legislation like GDPR and CCPA, and the rise of "privacy-first" browsers like Brave.
Not all cookie-based techniques are going to completely die, so without going into to much detail here are the highlights. With Google's latest recommendations due to land in the next two years, there are some fundamental changes that will take place.
One thing is for sure: cookies are not going away entirely – contrary to how it's phrased, cookies are not "blocked" but deleted in increasingly short amounts of time. (7 days down to 24 hours, meaning any conversions that take longer than a single day will fall off your attribution radar.) Even if Google has its way with its Chrome Sandbox concepts, the information will still be collected but completely anonymized.
The upside is that these changes could be a force for good, forcing us to become better at how we engage with our audiences, pushing our campaigns to drive higher impact through creativity, context, and relevance. These changes are put in place to improve their experience, after all.
Stepping forward into 2020, there are already solutions and tactics you can deploy to overcome some of the challenges in this new world of cookie transparency and data privacy. First and foremost, marketers need to move away from generic messaging, get a deeper understanding of their audience and engage with relevance and context. Below are four considerations for digital advertising in a cookie-less world.
If we previously relied on behavioral cookie targeting to serve relevant advertising, the small leap is to serve adverts to pages with content that's relevant to our products or services. If the content is targeted at our audience, and the publisher can prove that they have the right traffic coming to their site, then our adverts would do well to be placed there.
We have to understand the needs of our audience and the places they go to find answers. That way, we can be there next time they need help.
Not an entirely new concept, as many marketers are already doing it in some form. The original idea was introduced by Facebook some time ago. This type of marketing does not rely on cookies but the first-party customer data owned by the vendor. It enables you to engage your audiences on their platform of choice, and use targeting tools to home in on your target audience.
The catch here is that you will need to work within the walled gardens of the publishers (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and their targeting abilities.
Google (and I am sure others are too) is currently working on building a data hub that will enable you to use predictive models to improve ad targeting and prevent over-exposure – without the use of cookies. It will use machine learning to predict the likelihood of users returning to specific sites or pages and will tailor ad placements accordingly.
Joe Pulizzi and others have shown that brands can take ownership of the topics, sectors or categories they want to influence by cutting out the middleman and creating their own publishing platforms. They become the voice their audience engage with directly, gain insights into what their interests are, and become a trusted adviser rather than just a vendor.
Don't panic. Yes, it's scary to be told you have to change your practices, but the do-nothing alternative will be scarier in the long run. Focus instead on the purpose of the changes for our audiences. Change is taking place precisely because the current system is no longer fit for purpose. Relevance combined with creativity will always beat shouting a generic message across all channels.
