What will be lost when we lose cookies?
The digital advertising industry has been spurred by the combination of increased regulation and uncertainty regarding the future of third-party cookies to explore and develop more efficient and considerate methods of presenting ads to individuals who may be interested. Right?
The answer isn’t no, but it isn’t a resounding yes either. Stripping advertisers’ arsenals of third-party cookie- based solutions removes one intrusive targeting method. However, some of the cookieless solutions that have emerged or been heavily promoted in the run up to deprecation don’t necessarily deliver more privacy-preserving?alternatives. And beyond the privacy challenges, the larger question remains, how effective, actually, is the one-to-one marketing model made possible by cookies?
Is the cure worse than the disease?
Research into alternative identifiers finds that, instead of improving user privacy online, they “can make consumer surveillance in the Web dynamically wider, more persistent over time, and extra vulnerable to integration of first- and third-party data by advertisers”.?
We targeted too much
How many times can you expect the same consumer to buy a certain product, especially big ticket items, like mattresses or cars??In the words of Byron Sharp, “Sales growth won’t come from relentlessly targeting a particular segment of a brand’s buyers”. In the long term, limiting outreach to those who are already familiar with a brand risks shutting it away from wider public consciousness, causing it to “lose its place in culture”.
This has been excerpted from Part One of the Deep Dive we conducted together with ExchangeWire : Privacy and Efficacy –?a Case for Returning to One-to-Many Targeting.