Traditional ad-targeting and measurement methods like third-party cookie matching and mobile identifiers are crumbling, it’s true.
But many in the industry are not as pessimistic as some may have you believe.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lisa Giacosa, president of Publicis Media agency Spark Foundry, suggests that the erosion of the accepted infrastructure also carries with it opportunities to do something better.
‘Not frightened’
“The cookie was a means to an end anyway,” she says of the humble client-side text file. Usage of third-party cookies – a method many have used to match up identity profiles from users’ different devices – has already been eliminated by Apple and Mozilla and, soon, by Google’s Chrome.
“Cookies are only a proportion of the media mix. When you think about popular media channels, like marketing channels like in-app or connected TVs, they’ve never supported cookies. TV has never been a connected cookie-based medium.
“So it doesn’t frighten me as much as it does a lot of people.”
Going better
The ad industry is involved in a big effort to replace the kinds of features enabled by cookies, as well as mobile identifiers, in digital advertising.
Except for two things:
- In fact, there are several initiatives and competing techniques being offered in return.
- The alternatives offered by some go far beyond what was previously offered.
“The decline of the third-party cookie means that some data segments in certain contexts will become obsolete,” Giacosa concedes.
“Measurement is the other piece of the puzzle that gets impacted when we start to think about the fact that we can no longer use those third party cookies to understand and track ad exposure.”
Enhanced capabilities
However, Spark Foundry’s Giacosa thinks what comes next is an upgrade.
“We can start to really look at other data signals that get us to a place where we can be more relevant,” she says.
“In the activation space … that will mean that we are looking at increasing our reliance on first-party data.
“So that value exchange with a client becomes even more important in terms of how a client acquires first-party data around their consumers, what they’re offering, and how they deliver that. Which means that (use of) contextual will increase.
“It’s quite exciting from point of view of looking at the aggregating metrics, the lift testing, in terms of brand metrics, and of course, using probabilistic models like econometrics, like various other ways of measuring to get to the true answers.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
