The advertising industry as we know it is undergoing a major overhaul due to today’s unprecedented regulatory, ethical and technological challenges. From more stringent regulations like CCPA to users opting out of sharing their data for advertising and the deprecation of third-party cookies, advertising identifiers are most definitely on their way out.
According to IDC’s recent global survey, it’s encouraging to see that brands and media agencies are getting the message: 60% believe cookies and IDs will become obsolete in a matter of time.
What’s surprising, however, is that 41% of advertisers are only moderately familiar with targeting methods other than cookies or IDs. This clearly reflects that innovative cookieless technology companies must evangelize their models, which can be challenging for the industry to grasp. In particular, it can be easy for advertisers to get confused by solutions that claim to be cookieless.
Indeed, a significant number of these new solutions, including unified IDs and cohort-based targeting, still rely on IDs. Yet these technology providers, despite their best intentions, will find it extremely difficult to achieve the scalability required to become a true successor to cookie-based advertising.
Unified IDs are not scalable
ID-based solutions can’t be interoperable, and their siloed access will not offer marketers the reach they need. It would be virtually impossible to agree on one common unified ID standard. Even if it were to magically happen, it would still not solve the impossibility of executing pan-geographic global campaigns at scale. A global brand would never sign multiple agreements with this patchwork of unified ID solutions to reach 200K users among its audience.
Now, let’s imagine a world where interoperability was somehow solved. Even in that best-case scenario, unified IDs would ultimately still not succeed, as users are massively rejecting online tracking. On top of consumers’ non-cooperation, these unified ID solutions aren’t getting much help from the broad swath of publishers who have decided it is not in their best interests to share user data either. Additionally, the Private Relay setting on Apple’s Safari browser encrypts users’ IP addresses, making it impossible to reconcile them to unique IDs.
Cohort-based advertising is also a privacy risk
Google has been at the forefront of cohort-based targeting with Google Topics, a targeting modality that analyzes users’ browsing history to come up with general topics. In practical terms, a cohort brings together users based on their browsing habits and gives them the same Cohort ID. So, relatively speaking, this technique is still based on IDs.
But even when it captures user behavior at an aggregated level, at the end of the day, cohort-based targeting still gathers user information without users being fully conscious of it and relies on tracking their digital behavior.
Cohort-based advertising simply does not eliminate user privacy risks, leaving unsolved the concern that 60% of advertisers believe user tracking is a source of reputational risk for brands.
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Targeting personas – not people
Here is the good news. By deploying persona-based targeting instead of ID-based advertising, brands will be creating a privacy-first and future-proof paradigm while effectively engaging their customers at scale.
In doing so, advertisers will overcome their scalability concerns while aligning with what consumers and regulators want, including the CCPA. Instead of tracking users online, persona-based advertising focuses on the destinations where they consume content, using surveys that gather millions of actionable data points about an audience to build personas that are relevant to a particular brand.
Let’s suppose a brand wants to qualify the audience of a gaming app. By directly querying users, it will get a deeper understanding about this particular audience regarding their affinity for cycling, cooking and pets, etc., that goes beyond the simple fact that they’re using a gaming app.
This is how the industry shifts from a user-centric to a placement-centric perspective to deliver both scalability and enhanced standards for consumer privacy. If advertisers follow through and move beyond personalized advertising, I am confident it would spark a global movement that would inspire other brands to also leave ID-based ads behind.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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