With Google announcing that it is delaying plans to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser until 2023, the industry now has longer to prepare. MediaSense experts have listed out the actionable steps advertisers should be considering in this time.
MediaSense Digital Strategy Director, Leonardo Oliveira recently participated in a Blis & Fix panel ‘Can the Cookieless World be Made to Measure?
Outcomes from the Blis session:
- Recent advertising industry changes (App Transparency Tracking – ATT, Identifier For Advertisers – IDFA, Android Advertising Identifier – AAID, Third Party Cookies) are having a profound impact on digital media advertising
- Focus towards privacy is impacting the ability to deliver measurement, personalisation and scale
- There is a lack of clarity and overall uncertainty for brands as many agencies, publishers & platforms claim to have solutions, however, it is too early to understand what is future-proof
- Agility and ‘test & learn’ is required to effectively check the different proposed solutions (whether it is ID-based solutions, cohorts, contextual or probabilistic)
- Brands need to double down on collecting and nurturing their 1st party data, while also taking care of how that data is then deployed in ways that are respectful and relevant
- With consumers more privacy aware, brands must create the right value exchange, where consumers are comfortable and willing to share their data.
In the meantime, the industry has seen that Google decided to postpone the depreciation of third-party cookies to 2023, instead of 2022, as previously announced. The tech giant has explained that it will allow “sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services”, and is important “to avoid jeopardizing the business models of many publishers which support freely available content.”
Although many question the real reason behind this decision (pointing out to pressure from regulators), this has been welcomed by the industry, still trying to determine how to tackle it effectively while dealing with other changes to the data privacy landscape.
What should I be doing right now?
Leonardo Oliveira and Marcus Chomyszyn list out actionable steps for brands:
- Don’t stop what you’re doing!
- The changes won’t impact you only in the future; they are already impacting your media investment outcomes! Stay agile and focus on understanding what ‘is of value’ to your business
- Learn from the past
- Collect and baseline all historic performance data,
- Analyse historic data to identify correlations and trends (what works/doesn’t)
- Determine what works and what doesn’t
- Review KPIs to ensure they are aligned to the right objectives
- Test & Learn
- Is your data and tech stack future-proof?
- Are there any gaps and how can these be addressed?
- Which solutions best fit your future needs?
- Establish a vision
- Develop a data vision and dictionary for the role of data within your organisation (insight, activation, measurement)
- Address capability gaps (internally & externally) to support data vision
- Review relationships with agencies, platforms and tech partners to avoid unnecessary dependency
- Create the value exchange with consumers
- Transparency, honesty and authenticity are critical to building trust with users
- Be clear about how you will use any data that is captured
- Enable consumers to make choices in how their data will be used
- Evolving measurement
- Aggregated data will enable you to identify broader trends & correlations in a fragmented ecosystem
- Start to move away from the traditional goals & KPIs which may later become redundant
- Test different solutions, draw experiences from the marketplace and be open to new forms of measurement
MediaSense’s recently launched DiPA platform is enabling our clients to help better understand data and unlock digital performance – to make informed decisions (a future-proofed platform for the evolving digital ecosystem – both with and without cookies).