“Wait and see” is not the motto most of us aspire to.
Yet, with Google’s cookie deprecation timeline getting pushed back and the current landscape of competing first-party identifiers offering insufficient reach on their own, “wait and see” is the approach I see most marketers and advertisers taking today.
Location-based businesses – including retailers and restaurants – have undergone more change in the last two years than in the previous 10. Now, as pandemic restrictions lift, these location-based businesses are looking at a hybrid future that will require them to embrace digital strategies that support their brick-and-mortar stores.
When it comes to targeting, the ad industry is in the process of effectively turning back the clock 20 years.
And that’s not a bad thing.
The simple fact is that the ad industry, on its first run-up to personalized marketing, made a number of missteps. The time has come for a course correction. And while the transition may be rocky at times, we now have the opportunity – and means – of laying a sustainable, data-driven foundation for the future.
With additional browser- and device-based identifier restrictions dropping almost every other month, publishers are getting pitched a dozen addressability solutions every week – and we’re already seeing cases of buyer’s remorse: publishers not getting the value they expected from proposed solutions.
We’re a year into Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, and it’s time for app marketers to reconsider their iOS budget and dust off their iOS retargeting campaigns. With opt-in rates and overall IDFA availability far above what most expected, data shows iOS users continuing to generate significant revenue and higher ROAS – adding up to an impossible-to-ignore opportunity.
As audiences across all demographics continue to shift from linear viewing toward long- and short-form digital video, the continued growth of streaming was front and center during this year’s upfront presentations. And major subscription-based platforms announced their plans to add an AVOD version to their offering.
The apocalyptic headlines about cookie deprecation and the shift toward privacy have slowed somewhat ¬– but don’t get too comfortable. Regulators around the world remain emphatic about privacy, big ad tech still plans big deprecation and a cookieless future for ad tech will be here before you know it. But this is no apocalypse. It’s a new dawn for digital marketing – defined by the possibilities that a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies create.
If you are Gen X or (gasp!) a boomer, you remember a time when listening to the new hit song at home meant buying the whole album. Getting what you wanted required paying for a bunch of stuff you didn’t: the other ten songs on the record.
Every article I read about the “cookieless future” leaves me envisioning a desolate world where the dream of 1:1 marketing has died, and we’re all back to Wanamaker’s infamous cliché (Which half of my spend is wasted?).
But that dream is not dead. It’s just lost amid an increasingly fragmented landscape of first-party IDs – and clouded by the limited transparency and control offered by the Big Tech players.
The free and open internet as we know it is not free at all: Someone somewhere is footing the bill so publishers can fund the creation of that “free” content.
