The word “cookieless” crops up in virtually every conversation about the future of online identity.
But what exactly do people mean when they say “cookieless”?
Although the definition seems simple enough – the absence of cookies – it lacks the nuance to encompass the true complexity of signal loss.
It’s also a misnomer.
Defining terms
For one, first-party cookies aren’t going away.
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Real estate franchise Coldwell Banker, like the rest of the housing biz, has been targeting buyers who might be in the market for a new abode. But housing supply is at a low – meaning there’s not much for buyers to purchase. So this year, the company launched a new campaign to start talking directly to potential sellers.
Because Coldwell Banker has been around since 1906, its media strategy has adapted from the old days of print and magazine to the new age of TV, social and digital.
Today, sellers are typically older than those just getting started. So, while most brands are putting petal to the metal trying to reach younger generations across their media buys, Coldwell’s busy scoping out the old folks.
From a business perspective, Coldwell has always paid attention to its media impact on those looking to switch it up – there wouldn’t be home buyers without listings, after all – but its new omnichannel campaign marks the first time the company has aimed to reach sellers by delivering that messaging via mass media, said Victoria Kleichinger, VP of brand marketing at Coldwell.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Marilois Snowman, CEO and founder of Mediastruction.
Let’s be honest: The advertising industry is taking a few hits these days. Elon Musk buying Twitter raised a bit of a ruckus. Consumers have a love-hate relationship with Facebook.
Legislators are looking hard at treating ad platforms like utilities. Nefarious state actors have hacked our political discourse and even our understanding of facts.
But this isn’t the first time the ad industry is facing choppy waters. If the Mad Men era taught us anything, it’s that the ad world is in desperate need of a new position: the Chief Morality Officer.
Hear me out.
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Michael Jaconi, CEO & co-founder of Button.
Customer acquisition rates are up and ROAS is down across the walled gardens of Facebook and Google.
That’s hardly news at this point. It’s also well-known that, without the conversion-based measurement they’ve grown accustomed to on the walled gardens, marketers flock to media where they can reliably tap into purchase data.
Companies like Honey, Ibotta and Impact reached billion-dollar valuations on the back of this conversion-focused trend. I predict that the next wave of unicorns in the marketing stack will emerge on top of retail media.
Amazon Ads, the first scaled version of retail media, proved marketers would spend on a seemingly uncapped basis when they’re confident in the connection between ads and sales. Privacy issues add another feather to the retail media cap, since retailer platforms are largely unaffected by Apple’s changes.
But retail media strategies have taken their cues from the big walled gardens by targeting customers almost exclusively on their own retail properties where first-party customer data is applied.
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Oh, Snap
Snap warned investors this week that it will miss its one-month-old revenue target, tumbling shares by more than 40% in what may be a harbinger for the industry, CNBC reports.
“Since we issued guidance on April 21, 2022, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated,” says Snap in an SEC filing.
Inflation, supply-chain disruptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and interest rates have dampened ad spend.
The ripple effects from Snap’s filing were immediate: Meta shares slipped 8%, Pinterest sank 21% and Roku dipped 15%. Ad tech fell, too, with The Trade Desk down at one point 15% and PubMatic by 14%.
“We expect all online ad platforms to feel some impact of a significant consumer pullback,” Morgan Stanley analysts told investors. “Advertising is cyclical.”
But were other factors at play in Snap’s declining fortunes? Mobile Dev Memo’s Eric Seufert thinks there may be more to the story, namely Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) policy. Did Snap have to tweak its modeling or measurement infrastructure in response to ATT, dragging down revenue? Hard to say, but one thing is certain, Seufert says: There are more shoes left to drop with ATT.
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Google announced the latest updates to its shopping ad products at Google Marketing Live on Tuesday, with changes on the backend to how advertisers use its tech and on the consumer side.
These changes are becoming more necessary as the mobile Google Search feed evolves from primarily text-based responses to more visual elements on the page, said Tina Weyand, Google’s senior director of product management for retail ads.
“The organic experience is becoming more visual,” Weyand said. “And, so, we’re making sure that our ads are also becoming more visual and meeting those consumer needs.”
In practice that means presenting mobile users who make what Google considers to be shopping-related queries with “visual and immersive” content in the search feed, including a swipeable feed of sponsored products, sponsored merchants with their own carousel of items and organic product displays.
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Mobile ad platform LifeStreet released a new version of its DSP on Tuesday that shows developers what’s happening behind the scenes when they make a programmatic buy.
“Supply transparency is table stakes,” said CEO Levi Matkins. “The question isn’t just what are you bidding on; it’s why are you bidding on it?”
LifeStreet’s rearchitected DSP, called Nero, allows developers to quickly test variables that might impact a programmatic buy (e.g., cost, budget, KPI or bid type) and predict the likely outcome of different bidding strategies on campaign performance.
These tests run on a small portion of traffic, and the bid strategies with the best return on ad spend are applied to the overall campaign.
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Probabilistic attribution is just a “stopgap,” says Simon “Bobby” Dussart, newly appointed CEO of AppLovin-owned mobile measurement and attribution company Adjust.
Depending on who you ask, “probabilistic” could simply be a synonym for “fingerprinting,” but there is a distinction between them, Dussart says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Fingerprinting is explicitly verboten under Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency policy, but probabilistic attribution is a grayer area, because the goal isn’t to kludge together a persistent ID but rather to track people across sites by looking at a handful of parameters (clicks, time of install and basic device info) in order to estimate where an install came from. The data is obsolete after a few hours.
Even so, Apple could easily crack down on the practice.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Marc Rossen, SVP investment and activation analytics at Omnicom Media Group.
Clean rooms are emerging to provide the advertising industry a life raft in the era of cookie deprecation.
On the one hand, clean rooms are significantly better than relying on cookie-based ad server data. They enable more stable connections to consumers and their media engagement behavior for each supply side partner. However, the unintended consequence is fragmentation. While it’s possible to dig deep into a single source, it’s much more challenging to look across the media ecosystem to deliver insights, optimization and incrementality.
Taking the “room” metaphor literally, the current system is akin to a collection of stand-alone rooms existing outside the form and function of a house. That’s why the next level must look beyond clean rooms. It’s time to build a clean house using a method called distributed analytics.
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Game On
TikTok is testing in-app games in Vietnam and plans to push further into gaming, starting with Southeast Asia, sources tell Reuters. People can already share gameplay content on TikTok – like a video of them from Twitch, for example – but there are no actual TikTok-based games. In-app games would help TikTok make inroads with game developers, which tend to be some of mobile marketing’s biggest spenders, and also help boost the amount of time people spend in the app even higher than it is.
Plus, the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, has had in-app gaming for years, and so it would be a relatively easy lift – in terms of the tech, that is.
TikTok gaming would likely precipitate app store policy drama. (Just ask Epic Games.)
Google and Apple, in particular, have held the line on in-app games that essentially recreate standalone apps within another app. (As in, Apple wants people to download Zynga games, not play Zynga in TikTok.)
It’s not impossible that TikTok could make gaming work while giving Apple and Google a 30% cut, but that only leaves 70% to split between mobile developers and TikTok itself. And building a strong ad-based monetization ain’t easy.
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