Cookie Loss Driving Centralised Audience Initiatives

The trend of third-party cookie redaction continues, propelled by increased privacy concerns, technological changes, and regulatory scrutiny. Google Chrome, last browser standing, has officially launched a “slow roll” phasing out of 3rd party cookies through 2024, and brands are preparing themselves for what the cookieless future may bring.

Marketers are readying themselves for 3rd party cookie loss, demanding globally applicable remedies to their addressability challenges. This has set the stage for a disruption to the existing dynamics and logistics underpinning audience strategy and activation. Once firmly in the jurisdiction of local planning and trading teams, now audience definition, partnership development, and activation strategy are on the move, with local decision-making moving ever closer towards the global team’s sphere of influence.

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Global and regional brand and agency teams are increasingly looked to for answers to the cookie apocalypse in the form of technology implementation, audience strategies, use case blueprints, roadmap development and ongoing governance. With the below service areas all showing significant growth:

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• Data Collection – Developing a global data collection strategy to continue 1st party data collection, through the appropriate mechanisms, including the appropriate data and audience attributes, which will be most useful in powering personalisation.

• Data Management - Supporting clients in implementing the appropriate global technical infrastructure, data management and customer data platforms. Building audience segmentation blueprints, to power advertising through the relevant ad delivery platform integrations

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• Audience Planning - Clear global guidance on audiences and use cases, and how these two things are combined to power full-funnel targeting and personalisation at the local level.

• Audience Marketplaces - Global audience partnership, offering a full spectrum of targeting capabilities with economies of scale reflecting consolidated investment tactics.?

• Audience Operations - a central unit of audience specialists taking briefs from central / local activation teams, curating deals with partners, troubleshooting activation and providing ongoing optimisation.

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The cookieless future brings significant change and disruption to our clients and their marketing efforts. It’s completely understandable therefore that a new operating model, which favours central solutions design and implementation, may be required to chart the appropriate course.