Beginning to navigate the Cookieless era.

The announcement that Chrome has begun to deprecate third party cookies for 1% of its users made waves at the start of this year, sparking discussions on its implications. Surprisingly, given the anticipation leading up to this moment, it has left many grappling with uncertainties as to whether their own organisation’s planning and preparation will see them equipped to navigate the impending future state.

Understandably perhaps, it’s been difficult for some parties to plan, prepare and invest towards a moving target, as the date and proposed solutions have altered along this past four years and there are still plenty of unknowns that persist.

Amidst these changes, I am excited that the wheels are now in motion, the announcement has recaptured my fascination for how these changes will rearchitect ‘digital’ at large. There’s also an underlying sense of responsibility our industry bears as custodians of the internet, and this reset point will hopefully be reflected upon as a milestone moment where we collectively improved the experience for all.

I am not sure, however, that the news 1% (or c.32m) of Chrome users having 3PCs disabled has fully transmitted the speed of change the marketing and advertising ecosystem will encounter this year. The reality is that the marketing and advertising ecosystem is on the brink of significant transformation and the pace of the ramp up to 100% in Q3 may come to feel meteoric for some.

Hence, if you haven't embraced 'cookieless' approaches so far, it's time to explore the opportunities on this emerging frontier. We stand at the precipice of a new era, and it's crucial to take proactive steps now.

Although it is evident there is some consensus around standardised recommendations that exists within the trade press, truly – those steps depend on the individual circumstances of each stakeholder in the ecosystem. Despite this, I believe there are logical practices that anyone can consider:

1.?????? Understand your exposure to the signals that will be lost.

Delve beyond surface level discussions in relation to 3rd party cookies. It is worth digging in and unpacking what are the signals that are collected by 3PCs that you currently rely upon, either directly - as they are ingested to inform targeting or measurement; or indirectly, as they are central to a partner or vendor you use.

This should be an exercise that equates to a forensic accounting audit in so much that the risk should be quantifiable across different channels and marketing tactics. You might also want to project that exposure across future planned or proposed activity to prioritise how you can mitigate any potential impact.

Given the scale of the task, the ticking clock, and the likelihood that resources might already be allocated elsewhere, get help to do this if you need it. Specialist agencies such as Kinesso continue to be immersed in this topic, understand the right questions to ask and how to navigate complex technological infrastructure and data flows to give you a clearer picture.

2.?????? ??Turn measurement regression into progression.

Without a common currency to fuel holistic measurement many of the proposed answers to the measurement conundrum feel like a step backwards. For the most advanced players moving away from measuring incremental uplift at a 1:1 level over time, which was effectively the Holy Grail of marketing, will feel discomforting.

However, if strides forward for user privacy equate to a step back for measurement, all is not lost. Whilst in the short-term advanced attribution methods will regress into platform level reporting, with econometrics models getting more focus to determine how to apportion spend and so forth. In the longer term, these models (which, in fairness, have proven to be capable of being pretty accurate in the past!) will be supercharged. Our ability to process large volumes of data, homogenising it from different sources and making sense of it in real-time will only be compounded when marrying Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics and, dare I say it, AI. What we knew vs. what we might learn could be very interesting.

Another shameless plug. The team at Kinesso has been working in this space for a long time, before the buzzwords became fashionable and at a time when it was nerdy to be a nerd, not cool to be a nerd! As an aside - Nerdism needs to become less accessible because we should not all be able to readily understand what super-smart people who love being innovative with data and technology think! Anyway, these nerds have been working way ahead of time to build and test proprietary technology and evaluate 3rd party tech too.

Fundamentally, cookieless measurement products that surpass the capabilities we have today already exist and are waiting to be populated with real-word, scaled data. Talk to us about them!

3.?????? Don’t wait for it to come to you.

In the consumer tech world, I’ve always envied the early adopters. I tend to rock up in the early majority and pretend like I was there before ‘it’ was a ‘thing’, but in truth, I was never brave enough to be out there on the edge, championing things that could make you look ridiculous in hindsight. Hence, with plenty more at stake in the corporate world, I take my hat off to the industry players that have either invented or participated in the innovative responses to the resulting challenges surrounding identity, privacy, transparency, automation and so on, whether they come to fruition and achieve scale or not.

There’s a handful of players across the board who have demonstrated real gumption and sought to discover the opportunity in all of this. ‘This’ being something bigger than cookieless - a reimagining of what digital relationships between brands/publishers/consumers looks like; enabled and orchestrated by data, technology, and people (marketers and their agencies) with a moral compass embedded at its core.

The common thread to those players, wherever they might sit, is that they have taken action to take control the controllable, for them. For me, they are the one’s poised to capitalise on the opportunity this presents. Much like the dawn of ecommerce I believe that across verticals this moment presents a new opportunity to dramatically shift market share for those ready and able to seize it.

Behind the scenes audience journeys will be fragmented and mostly impossible to connect. Within Europe, at least, critical mass does not seem to have amassed around any one solution or ID type. This means that brands who do not spread their tentacles far and wide enough could neglect to address audiences at critical moments of their journeys and competitors could swoop in.

The only way to do this is to test. But to test with new expectations. Across the end-to-end supply and delivery of digital advertising, no matter the channel, there will be a levy on efficiency. How much the advances in automation and intelligence can offset this remains to be seen. However, Advertisers upgrading their technology stacks to include CDPs and Clean rooms; Publishers investing in ID graphs and consortiums; and everyone in-between navigating the increased cost of exploring how to connect advertiser to consumer, can only lead to short term cost inflation. Couple that with supply being broken up, meaning a likely increase of demand against fewer 'eyeball moments', which for biddable channels at least, will also increase costs. Finally, the compounding factor of not being able to recognise all conversions that an activity has influenced may also play a factor in driving effectiveness down.

That is, of course, unless you can access a scaled and robust enough audience that you can persistently recognise across multiple destinations. Again, Kinesso made moves well ahead of time to integrate Acxiom’s ethical consumer data into an audience solution that combines many attributes not derived from cookies. We translate these audiences into persistent, pseudonymised IDs with unprecedented levels of matching to a diversified inventory of addressable partners, across channels.

In short, beyond what's already written as best practice, to best mitigate the impact of 3rd party cookie deprecation on your business there are three main things to start with:

1.?????? Dig deeper into the data – quantify your exposure.

2.?????? Explore ways to implement innovative measurement techniques using new technology.

3.?????? Be on the front foot, taking action, remembering it is a competitive arena – don’t wait for a new normal to be dictated to you, create it yourself.

Root this in a clear understanding of marketing’s contribution to the financial performance of your business and make decisions based on how they will serve the intended marketing use cases required to support this contribution.

Opinions are my own.

I work for Kinesso, creating Data and Technology solutions for clients. Kinesso are a tech-driven performance agency delivering real intelligence that moves you forward. Kinesso are a part of IPG. www.kinesso.com

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