by Lauren Dick, Executive Director, Media & Data Services, Mail Metro Media
If you work in digital marketing, you’ll be aware that 2023 should finally see Google’s oft-delayed deadline for third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome arrive in Q3. Expect to see a sharp increase in ‘test and learn’ projects in the identity space early next year, as brands, agencies and publishers alike search for alternative ways to provide the ad targeting and measurement capabilities previously enabled by cookies.
It’s already clear that there won’t be a single solution to act as a replacement for third-party cookies and that advertisers will require a range of different options, depending on their strategy and business goals. As a result, there’s already momentum gathering around the testing of publishers’ identity solutions, which, from my own organisation’s perspective, couldn’t be more timely.
Since 2018 and the introduction of GDPR in Europe, the use of personal data has been a huge area of focus for Mail Metro Media and for our advertising clients. As a premium publisher, we own rich first-party relationships with our users, i.e. we are responsible for managing user consent and how we then utilise consented user data within an advertising framework. We have a proprietary Consent Management Platform to help keep our massive first party data sets fully up-to-date and one step ahead of any future regulatory changes.
Over the past four years, we’ve been working on our own new identity solution to help connect advertisers to our audiences across dmg media’s growing portfolio of brands. In the last nine months, we finalised our plans and recently launched our future-proofed identity solution, dmg::ID, on to the market.
Introducing dmg::ID
With our audience connections growing every day through behaviours captured across websites, subscriptions, registrations, comments and online shopping, our new solution empowers us, our clients and our tech partners to segment and scale our audiences. Our data set now includes more that 90 million global IDs and 330 different types of signal. Our audience spends more than 4 billion minutes with our brands every month.
In developing dmg::ID, we wanted to ensure that we encompass all parts of our businesses and all our different audiences, whether that’s someone in the market for a mortgage or a mattress. We also wanted to make sure that we had different tiers of availability within the solution, depending on our client’s data maturity. Not all brand advertisers have a large pool of their own first-party data to draw on. For that reason, one-to-one email matching is not the be all and end all of our dmg::ID. We really focused on making this a very flexible solution; agnostic to different vendors, and accessible to clients of all data maturity, not just those with a great email database.
The scale and the diversity of the owned and operated sites that we have, combined with the frequency and engagement we see from our users, adds up into a powerful proposition. We’ve also built in layers of proprietary encryption to ensure that we have a completely secure framework and we’re well placed to evolve and stay ahead of any future changes to data regulations.
Beyond the targeting options that the new solution opens up, it provides flexibility to tie dynamic messaging through to specific audiences, whether that’s based on their location or their patterns of behaviour.
Commercial conundrum
Another trend that will be important in digital advertising in 2023 will be commerce. During the pandemic and lockdown of recent years, there was a massive boom in ecommerce and that increased popularity shows no sign of diminishing. As a result, we may see the emergence of different performance metrics as different standards are set for digital advertising to deliver performance and sales.
Shopping data is an amazing indicator of intent which, when used in combination with our storytelling and targeting capabilities, could offer an incredibly powerful way to find and match target audiences. As the trend toward ‘cookieless’ finally reaches a crescendo, brands are advised to now work more directly with premium publishers in 2023 to ensure the accuracy and reach of their ad targeting.
