Preparing for the uncertainty of promoting with out third-party cookies – Digital promoting
Jonas Jaanimagi
Jonas joined IAB Australia as a technology leader in January 2017, having previously been a board member for almost five years. Before that, he was Head of Media Strategy and Operations and Media Manager at REA Group. Jonas’ digital career began in 1999 when he and three employees moved to a startup financial publishing company, which over a period of 8 years grew into an organization with over 100 employees. Jonas then founded and established WebAds UK, a company specializing in digital advertising sales for business and finance. After successfully driving the business into profitability, Jonas was turned on its head by Hi-Media, Europe’s largest independent advertising network with access to more than 150 million unique users. Before Jonas moved to Australia with the REA Group in 2012, he worked at Videology as Director of Product Management for Europe.
From today’s perspective, cookies from third-party providers will no longer be available by the end of 2022. As a result, marketers will face widespread limitations in managing their digital marketing, affecting frequency controls, campaign targeting, and attribution / measurement.
The effects of this death of the cookie will be far-reaching in practice. In response, the industry has made great strides in identifying collaborative approaches and solutions that will provide real support to the marketing industry once these changes are in place.
The global industry focus on reshaping digital marketing to adapt to impending constraints has been driven by IAB Tech Lab for nearly a year. More than 700 people from 40 different countries, representing over 400 companies and 20 industry associations, took part in this process through Project Rearc. The aim is to provide uniform technical standards around the world that will enable business needs, consumer privacy requirements, and accountability mechanisms for digital marketing to continue to thrive from 2023 onwards.
The Rearc project is now in the critical phase of evaluating the various proposals that will be incorporated into the development and testing of the resulting necessary framework conditions for future standards.
While there are still a lot of moving parts around, there are some practical and immediate considerations that marketers can and should be focusing on with all the noise.
From a technical point of view, the solutions can be broken down into three or four different approaches. In practice, however, the focus can be reduced to one important and achievable recommendation for marketers: Gain a proficient understanding of the opportunities and challenges associated with working with authenticated users and anonymous consumers.
Working with authenticated consumers
We can be very confident that the future is guaranteed for responsibly collected, consensual and data protection-compliant first-party data regardless of the evolving mechanisms, new data protection requirements and legal restrictions. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the important roles both identity management and addressability play in digital marketing is vital for all marketers.
Building an open relationship with consumers and securely storing their consumer data is key. Then if you can ensure that you can authenticate yourself regularly, you can create a permanent and universal identity diagram for each consumer.
Known as the Universal ID, this provides a unique view of each consumer that is persistent, consistent and valid across all appropriate data collection channels. The implicit design of universal ID frameworks requires that users identify themselves, usually through login or through multi-factor authentication. This of course has an enormous positive effect on quality, but also on size restrictions.
Examples of some of the identity solutions currently available are The Trade Desk Unified ID 2.0, IdentityLink from LiveRamp, ID5, Fabrust, Tapad, Zeotap from Neustar and others.
Responsible collection and management of a universal ID is one thing, but in order to activate this asset it must become addressable for purposes of targeting, campaign management, and measurement. Similar to what we are currently doing with cookies, the token versions of these IDs must be matched anonymously between buyers and sellers.
The complexity of these solutions and the investment required make it critical for marketers to really focus on a first-party data audience strategy. This serves both the activation, expansion and provision of your own databases (e.g. authorization-based CRM data records) in a manner that complies with data protection regulations, as well as the possibility of working with other parties to maximize identification coverage or improve their IDs in a fully and widely addressable manner.
Once third-party cookies are removed, the success of a universal ID depends on the ID’s acceptance across the ecosystem. We are seeing some ID solutions at play and hopefully in the future these can be made fully interoperable and allow for democratic mutual growth. Of course, the IAB will always advocate the collaborative approach.
Last year, the IAB Data Council published a data handbook that covers many of the above points in greater detail and with specific backgrounds and guidance, including efforts to achieve transparency and consistency for the target audience segments through the Data Label initiative. It’s dry but very useful read.
Working with Anonymous Consumers
Behavioral and contextual alignment are making a sincere comeback as they are very secure as a general approach to all consumer privacy concerns. Indeed, these solutions are preserved as they only allow the sharing of content-based and contextual attributes without user IDs backed up by standardized taxonomies.
Many publishers now happily welcome the value of context as it nostalgically increases the importance and value of the content on their pages and related stakeholders that can be created. It also avoids an unhealthy obsession with relentless registrations, ID management, and discreet authentication.
For some time now, detailed semantics have provided phenomenal insights into the contextual value and meaning of content based on the content, form, style, or origin of text, rather than just assessing the traditional linguistic definition of words or keywords. Too often, this type of technology has focused solely on mitigating the risks associated with keywords and inappropriate environments for brand security needs. However, because of the wealth of knowledge, it can offer far more valuable targeted attributes. More recently, these attributes have been enhanced with the integration of machine learning capabilities against intelligence, as well as natural language processing and even image recognition.
Many of the proposals submitted in Project Rearc to work with anonymous consumers followed the same principles as an original proposal from Google called Privacy Sandbox. These posts (with acronyms that have mysteriously taken on a bird theme) allow publishers and marketers to manage consensual users and ultimately categorize them into predetermined anonymous interest groups or cohorts. They offer a number of different approaches to determining where these anonymous data sets are physically located, and whether the data can be successfully and safely incorporated into machine learning decisions and modeling. and where the programmatic auctions would physically take place.
However, the targeting and measurement for each of these suggestions is based on the use of anonymous consumers and untraceable IDs.
Marketers can gain a lot by embracing this inevitable trend of working with anonymous consumers. It pays to fully test and understand the forms of anonymous web solutions by experimenting with the insights, possibilities, and potential possibilities that come with them. Working with the right vendors is essential as the skill level and scope of their capabilities can vary.
What do I do now?
All marketers
- Familiarize yourself with the opportunities and challenges of working with authenticated users and anonymous consumers.
- Follow the work on Project Rearc with updates from IAB Australia.
- Be part of the upcoming changes, review your needs as a company, and implement a longer term audience data strategy – either internally or with partners.
Marketers with first party data
- Assess and question the quantity, quality, interoperability and extent of your current internal data. Plan for future mandatory approval requirements.
- Review opportunities for partnerships to either expand / improve your own data sets and / or improve the addressability and viability of those sets.
- Work with IAB Australia on the Data Transparency Standards and Data Labeling Initiative.
Marketers without first party data
- Skillfully formulate and implement a clear and robust data strategy from first-party providers, either internally or through suitable and competent partners.
- Try out more anonymous web solutions and experiment with the insights, opportunities, and potential possibilities that come with them. Some examples of solutions provided by IAB Australia members are Oracle Contextual Intelligence, DoubleVerify Custom Contextual Targeting, and Silverbullets 4D.
- Look out for the IAB Australia Data Council’s upcoming Contextual Targeting Guide in 2021.
