How the ad industry can use its borrowed time to future-proof first-party data solutions
By Eyeota
Trent Lloyd, co-founder and head of brand solutions, Eyeota
Google’s updated timeline for its Privacy Sandbox rollout, including its two-year delay of third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, didn’t come as a surprise to many industry observers, given the limited utility of Google’s FLoC and the slow momentum of the Privacy Sandbox in the World Wide Web Consortium. Ultimately, Google’s decision underscores the power publishers now have, as well as the immense value that advertising-funded content brings to the open web.
That said, for advertisers and publishers alike, a lot needs to change. Google’s delay might represent a brief reprieve from the loss of certain targeting and tracking capabilities, but the writing is on the wall. We’ve glimpsed the future of advertising, and it requires a different playbook. Here we take a look at where our industry needs to be focusing its energy between now and the rescheduled cookie doomsday.
Cohort onboarding is the key to unlocking first-party data
For marketers, the longer road to a cookieless reality grants companies more time to develop and fully leverage their first-party data. One powerful avenue for doing this — not only in the U.S., where deterministic data has been overemphasized to date, but also globally, where a consistent solution can be applied across multiple markets — is through cohort onboarding.
Cohort onboarding represents a consumer-friendly solution to harnessing first-party data by enabling marketers to transform their first-party data assets into powerful digital audiences to reach new customers, enhance marketing analytics, deepen insights and boost omnichannel campaign performance. After all, most brands collect a lot of valuable information about their customers — CRM data, transactional spending, loyalty card metrics, survey responses and more. This data often sits in silos and, therefore, can be challenging to put into action. With cohort onboarding, advertisers bring these disparate sources together and transform them into addressable digital audiences to target and engage. The resulting propensity models enable brands to reach new consumers, at scale, who demonstrate the same attributes and behaviors as a brand’s existing customer base.
Retailers in particular have an abundance of siloed first-party data that they can use to enhance their marketing intelligence. Take, for example, a grocery store chain with a popular loyalty card program. Using propensity models, the grocer could analyze its loyalty card data across specific geographic areas to create audience cohorts that are, for example, female and purchase organic products. Those audience cohorts could then be matched to privacy-compliant online IDs to create digital audiences that enable the retailer to send tailored offers through traditional and digital channels. The same approach allows them to acquire new customers focused on certain product offers, and strategically place advertisements. The potential is there as well to sell privacy-compliant data to consumer packaged goods organizations for campaign targeting.
In other words, in a cookieless world, cohort onboarding enables retail brands to develop high-scale, relevant audiences using first-party data. These same methods can be applied to other industries with similar results.
Future-proofing through agnostic ID solutions
Of course, …read more
Source:: Digiday