Is ‘cookieless’ or ‘ID-less’ targeting and measurement still an active talking point for advertisers and their agencies, or has the digital media conversation already moved on to other things? NDA, in partnership with Nano Interactive, recently hosted a roundtable discussion of senior agency and brand marketers to find out. Read Part One of the discussion here.
NDA’s editor Justin Pearse hosted the discussion and was joined by: Gen Braine, Local Digital and Performance Planning Lead, Domino’s; Freddy Clapson, Global Programmatic & Innovation Lead, team x Global; Charles Crotty, Managing Partner, Digitas Publicis; Patrick Hann, Ad Tech Manager at the IAB UK; Michael Murray, Head of Programmatic, OMD EMEA; Ruth Reynolds, Technology Director, Havas Media UK; and Niall Moody, CRO, Nano Interactive.
Discussing why the transition to cookieless remains a concern for marketers, Crotty commented: “A lot of digital advertising continues to deliver a really poor experience for consumers. There are still ads popping up everywhere, driving people mad. Advertising should be seen as a good thing because it enables a free internet and funds quality content, but that goodwill is being muddied by backend tech, bad formats and unwelcome targeting.
“Cookieless targeting is still an important area for marketers, particularly if you are doing lots of programmatic buying, but it’s just one of many subjects that need our attention.”
Reynolds believes that due to time pressures, there is a tendency in marketing to focus on immediate performance which means a lot of marketers don’t have bandwidth to prioritise cookieless future-proofing at the moment.
“Generally speaking, there’s a lot of fatigue around the subject of cookieless. People don’t want to do that meeting anymore; they would rather talk about something else, perhaps that will change again when the Chrome update finally goes live!”
She added: “From an agency perspective, it’s our job to understand the ins and outs of how these things work, but clients don’t necessarily want to or need to go into the full detail of activating cookieless tech. It’s information overload sometimes.On things like data privacy and compliance, they expect us and the vendors to have the necessary expertise and trust us to take care of it for them (in line with their DPO approvals).”
Brand thinking
Clapson shared: “We have been testing cookieless approaches internally for a couple of years now and seeing some great results. In terms of the marketplace, we’re now in a competitive environment where everyone is trying to replace cookies but no one has the scale to actually do it. Many clients have an audience-first approach to marketing, but a lot of these solutions are only capable of reaching a small percentage of the internet. So, do we target audiences with alternative identifiers, first party data, contextual modelling of audiences or some other approach? It’s like there are nine different ways to do this and all of them are slightly wrong.”
Braine of Domino’s commented: “First-party data is obviously important to a brand like ours in terms of retargeting and our loyalty programmes, but it’s a case of finding where it sits within our wider marketing strategy. We want to use it appropriately. Would we as a brand invest in an identity solution to replace cookies? It’s something that needs to be taken into consideration but there are lots of options that need to be reviewed.
“It’s really important for us to always be considering the whole measurement piece also. We have lots of money going into campaigns in walled gardens, lots of money into DSPs, and paid search is another area that takes up a big part of our marketing budget. We need to have the right tools in place to allow us to model the outcomes of our campaigns and spend where we will get the best return on investment, but also the best for our customers.”
Hann pointed out that having access to lots of first-party data isn’t always the advantage it should be. He said: “People say that first-party data is the new oil, but there’s often a big discrepancy between having customer data and being able to leverage it in any meaningful way. In terms of the ID solutions that are out there, there are maybe half a dozen offering a similar sort of scale. At some point in the next few years, we’ll see some of those merge as the marketing industry works out how it wants to use data and the value exchange with the customer required to make it happen.”
An uncertain future?
Murray shared his frustration that the whole ‘cookieless’ conversation is dominated by the decisions of a handful of big tech platforms. “I find it annoying that the independent tech sector doesn’t always get a fair shot at solving some of the problems advertisers face. It’s difficult to see how we as agencies and brands can influence that conversation. We may have our own ideas but then one of the big players makes a choice and that instantly becomes the new roadmap.”
Summing up the conversation, Moody of Nano Interactive said: “Cookieless marketing is here already. If we wait to see what happens next with the big platforms, I think we would be missing the point and squandering the opportunity that exists to change things for the better.
“Right now, we have the opportunity to target and measure campaigns in different ways that are more linked to business outcomes, rather than settling for a limited set of platform metrics. As an optimist, I think ‘cookieless’ or ID-less creates an opportunity for more collaboration and a more open industry, moving away from a reliance on ID signals and walled gardens.”
