With the upcoming deprecation of third-party cookies on the market-leading Chrome browser, the global marketing industry is already hard at work on finding alternatives to target, serve and measure advertising campaigns.
But how advanced are those plans, and how likely are they to deliver both the results that advertisers need, as well as the privacy-compliant yet relevant advertising that consumers are demanding?
One early trend in response to restrictions on user signals has been an over-investment of ad budgets focused on the major ‘walled gardens.’ As such, reaching addressable audiences beyond the walled gardens and on the open web represents a major, untapped opportunity for many advertisers.
LiveRamp recently commissioned original research (conducted by Censuswide) to investigate the readiness of marketers for life without cookies. We sought to explore the alternative methods of targeting and attribution being considered by advertisers and their agencies.
The research found that 73% of UK marketers are not well prepared for the withdrawal of third party cookies, despite 92% believing the deadline won’t be extended again. Meanwhile, 60% are still developing a first-party strategy, 51% are concerned about identity / addressability and 72% are planning to spend more on the open web.
“Delivering targeted advertising to individuals at scale on the open web, without the need for legacy identifiers, is the ambition of all marketers right now,” said Travis Clinger, SVP of Activations and Addressability at LiveRamp. “Yet, many brands are still delaying testing and adopting strategies, despite these being key to enable them to effectively target consumers in a privacy-safe way post cookies. Marketers may be intimidated by the complexity of the process, and should seek the support of reliable partners rather than trying to manage it internally – what they’ll find is that people-based marketing helps address many of their concerns, including frequency capping and measurement, as well. Most importantly, marketers should know that these solutions work today and can have an immediate impact on the reach and ROAS of their Q1 campaigns”
In our latest whitepaper, Future-proofed marketing: how brands intend to reach addressable audiences beyond the walled gardens, prepared in association with New Digital Age, we present the full findings of our research, alongside contemporary market insights from a range of ad industry leaders, including senior executives from Boots UK, Mediacom, Dentsu UK, Boden, tails.com, Dunnhumby, Spark Foundry, Matterkind and the IAB UK.
“There are considerable benefits to making the shift to cookieless solutions sooner rather than later. It’s estimated that 50% of the internet is already cookieless,” comments Travis Clinger, SVP Activations and Addressability, LiveRamp.
Therefore, we believe that those who successfully implement ‘people-based’ activation and measurement solutions, which leverage privacy-compliant, first-party data, and which provide insight across all omnichannel marketing activities, will be best able to stay connected with their high-value audiences.
With that in mind, the report delves into five key themes, and offer marketers some valuable insights into the future of addressability for their own organisation:
- Privacy, personalisation and performance in a post-cookie world
- Future-proofing addressability with first party data
- Addressability beyond the walled gardens
- Data-led decision making and ‘people-based’ marketing
- Partnerships make people-based marketing possible
To learn more about what brands are doing to ready themselves for a world without cookies, you can access the full report, “Future-proofed marketing: how brands intend to reach addressable audiences beyond the walled gardens”.