The demise of the cookie equals the resurrection of context

As per the original article, “After 25 years of using cookies, our needs for the critical web tool are changing. Though some may say the cookie is dying, the truth is that the cookie is not going anywhere, it’s just in need of a bit of a change”.

“We are delighted to be able to share the whitepaper, detailing the ‘Current State of The Cookie’ and what it means for advertisers - as it is a pertinent topic that needs to be addressed now and rightfully should have been considered as early as last year, in order to create a continuum for performance once wholly removed from the ecosystem.”- Clare Trafankowska. Managing Director of iProspect South Africa.

Clare has called out the impact on and key opportunities per specialisation as being:

- People-based / 1st Party customer match becomes ever more important, as does leveraging targeting capabilities of engine-owned options such as Google and the power of their in-market audiences.

- Measurement will be greatly impacted and with the need for attribution model adjustments being made. Contextual targeting will become the new norm.

Social Media:

- Without the ability to connect data, social media ads may become broader, less tailored and may drive fewer sales.
- As with search, the greatest opportunity will be in leveraging People-based / 1st Party customer match. Where with retailer commerce brands, their greatest opportunity will be in allowing social platforms to house a seamless sales experience (shop within the platform vs click-to-shop externally) which can remain first-party.

- Brands will need to investigate ways to engage with users based on video category, video influencers and channels; not dissimilar to the way TV is bought when desiring affinity.

- Online-to-offline attribution is going to pose the greatest opportunity and those brands that have already embarked on a Measurement strategy and with the right martech to support, are a step ahead of their peer set.

Jaco Lintvelt, Managing Director of Dentsu Data Labs added that advertiser first-party data, offers the biggest opportunity, and that: “Strategies will increasingly become focused on context, sentiment and placement and other targeting objectives that are not reliant on personal data. It is likely that a renaissance in traditional planning and activation techniques will emerge. Targeting broader audiences may results in a return to more panel-based planning. This has the advantage of being personal data free and not hyper targeted. Hyper-targeted audience may look and feel good on media plans, but they are difficult to scale and it is very important to understand the provenance of the data.”

At Dentsu we have a long tradition in placing ads in contextual and highly trending topics through our M1 product. In real-time we can identify trending articles and key content and deliver contextually relevant ads, that do not use personal data. With context it is about understanding consumer content consumption habits and what they are interested in reading about. This can better inform brands to help capture attention, making the audience care more and provide experiences that build a stronger relationship between consumer and brand.

We are also seeing a shift in the types of objectives to which advertisers work. For brand campaigns digital KPIs are at best a good proxy for a desired outcome. We are beginning to see a shift to attention-based buying as advertisers increasingly look to build brands online”.

Increasing the strength of a brands first party identity graph is extremely important and this is an area most regional brands will have to invest in aggressively in the next few months.

Building an AdTech and Martech infrastructure that can function well on first party data and cookies will be extremely important to keep being relevant and personalised to clients.

At Dentsu we have three ways we can assist clients to get this solution activated in the short term:

Our recommendation here is to think big, start small, move fast and with clear use case, as this is an area of our industry that is not going to be waiting for anyone.