Get your head around the future of cookies with ADMA’s Internet Cookie Masterclass April 21, 2021 11:12 Sponsored by ADMA The demise of third-party cookies is the biggest transformational event to impact digital marketing in 20 years. In order to survive and thrive in this unchartered territory, it’s vital that marketers get their head around the impending changes, and gain a better understanding of what they will mean for their own businesses. It goes without saying that eliminating third-party cookies will have a major impact on the industry and the way ads are being served, but it’s not the doomsday that some would have you believe. Preparation, education, and forward-thinking strategies are key. Doing nothing will have a material impact on your business. Google is moving the goalpostsYou may be aware that Google is getting rid of third-party cookies. But are you aware of how drastically this will change marketing? This is not equal to a mere algorithm change, this is a fundamental shift in the way the entire digital marketing ecosystem works.ADVERTISEMENT The current privacy regulation reviews have been an extreme catalyst of change for the tech giants, no longer allowing you to have direct interaction with consumer data that has historically been available via cookie based technology.Expect broad reaching impacts on audience targeting, personalisation strategies and tracking & measurement capability. These changes require new approaches to online marketing strategies if they are to continue to deliver strong bottom line results.The danger of doing nothingThe phrase ‘cookieless’ has entered our vernacular, but many marketers don’t have much more than a vague plan to tackle the third party cookie apocalypse. It’s time to act now before 2022 rolls around and you’re left with crumbs of data and potentially a dead business model. This is firmly in the laps of marketers. The data-driven marketing industry has thrived on the advantages that third party cookies have offered for:Audience segmentation Personalised digital campaigns Tracking online consumer behaviour Retargeting via social media advertising Building lookalike audiences Buying highly targeted ad inventory in real time The effective and highly segmented campaigns of today – with good conversion rates and low costs per click or acquisition – may not work as third party cookies disappear from the digital ecosystem. When the time finally comes, Google, Apple, the ACCC and the government will not wait around for marketers to be ready. Privacy has already been on the agenda for years and several inquiries are about to deliver their milestone reports in various areas, all of which will impact the data-driven marketing and advertising industry. The time to get prepared is now.Why marketers are in the firing lineThe changes to the cookie environment will have a significant impact on all marketers. Up until now, cookies have been central to every good marketers’ digital marketing strategy, but as the third-party cookie deprecates, an unprepared business will see changes to its bottom line that will fall directly under marketing’s remit.Marketers own the customer relationship, so it is up to them to have the right conversations with internal and external team members. Marketers need to care about the current cookie conversation largely to ensure they are on top of measurement and attribution, in order to maintain or create a competitive advantage and to continue to effectively be able to deliver against their businesses’ expectations – revenue, growth and efficiency of spend.Marketers will need to completely rethink their relationship with their current and future customers and look at developing more robust first-party data solutions. Future-proofing for a privacy-first marketing world Historically, the ACCC, the Attorney General’s Department and government inquiries in general may not have been a key focus for marketers, since the big headlines were typically provided in updated training from legal and compliance teams in the business. Marketers tended to rely on agencies and big tech to handle all conversations regarding cookies, reaping the rewards without much thought to the mechanisms behind it.However, there are currently many open inquiries that are directly related to digital platforms and the outcome of these will have a huge knock-on effect on how marketers operate, and the tools they use to ensure they are still achieving their same results. Self regulation and preparing for a ‘privacy first’ marketing world should be a priority for 2021. Understanding how and where you collect, store and activate consumer data ensures your ability to adhere to growing regulations.While cookies are not a core focus of the regulatory conversation, it will impact how regulatory change is applied in practice. Add to that the obvious compliance measures that will change through regulatory developments, whether that be the ACCC’s digital advertising inquiry, the Attorney General’s Departments Review of the Privacy Act or other inquiries coming from the ACCC’s Digital platform Inquiry…. it all overlaps with understanding cookies. What the FLoC?Google is currently developing technology alternatives to the third party cookie, which the $9.1 billion Australian advertising and marketing supply chain heavily relies upon.Google describes its technology replacements for third party cookies as a ‘privacy sandbox’, which technically includes more than a dozen different programs, many of which are now being tested in beta mode.The two biggest projects replacing third party cookie technology in Chrome include:FLoC: The Federated Learning of Cohorts program which groups users into a ‘cohort’ based on their browsing behaviour. The idea is that these cohorts are large enough to prevent user identification and therefore protect privacy. Fledge: This is a retargeting API that sends two independent requests to a server for ads. It was initially based on Google’s Turtledove project but is now in early testing with advertisers under a ‘Bring Your Own Server’ model. Marketers need to be across potential new solutions so that when things start to change, they’ll already be one step ahead. The phasing out of third-party cookies is the biggest change in the digital landscape since the introduction of real-time bidding. Learn more at ADMA’s Internet Cookies Masterclass of seven virtual sessions over seven weeks. Find out more here. CONTENT SPONSORED BY ADMA ADVERTISEMENT