By Stephanie Famolaro, senior director, business development, ANZ at The Trade Desk
Advertisers have been living with anticipation for years now. When will Google finally kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome browser? The first time Google announced that the cookie’s days were numbered was in 2020. However, over the past six years since joining The Trade Desk, I’ve seen more and more brands bin cookie-based targeting in favour of much more compelling alternatives that have come to market.
And there’s a good reason for it — advertising doesn’t need cookies. In fact, the phaseout of cookies will finally allow brands to deliver even more high-quality, targeted and personalised connections to consumers. In recent years, I have been working with many leading brands that are getting ready for a better, cookieless future. Here are some ways forward-looking marketers are approaching the next era of digital advertising.
1. Bolster your first-party data
Putting data at the heart of advertising is the first way brands are preparing for a cookieless future. Doing so requires marketers to embrace the most valuable marketing asset they already have access to: first-party data.
First-party data is the consented information brands collect directly from consumers that reveals online behaviours such as browsing habits, website activity and purchasing preferences. Any brand with an online presence can unlock this rich dataset to achieve its marketing objectives to help grow its business.
This data enables brands to gain direct insight into how, when and what consumers engage with online. Beyond this, it can enhance a marketing strategy, increase effective targeting, reduce wasted spend and improve the consumer experience — with access to more relevant ads, without sacrificing privacy.
But first-party data is just one piece of the puzzle personalised advertising.
2. Enrich your first-party data with third-party data
While first-party data is a great starting point for advertising in the post-cookie era, it’s not enough on its own to enable state-of-the-art targeting and attribution. When you combine first-party data with third-party data, you get a result that’s worth more than the sum of the parts.
With third-party data, marketers can achieve even more sophisticated levels of targeting. For example, The Trade Desk recently partnered with Ambee, a global climate tech company and provider of hyperlocal pollen data, so our customers can reach people in specific geographical areas that are high in pollen. If you’re a brand that sells antihistamines, that’s a rich data source you can benefit from. Even brands in the wider pharmaceutical and healthcare sector could leverage this kind of data as part of their media buying strategy.
3. Reach your target audience through an omnichannel approach
Reaching your target audiences at the right time, at the right place is a multi-pronged approach for digital marketers. Consumers don’t just sit on one channel. Broadcast video-on-demand (BVOD), music and audio streaming, mobile apps and online gaming are just some of the channels on the open internet that consumers engage with. And there’s a whole world of digital advertising opportunities on the open internet.
A key part of advertisers spending their budget effectively is about understanding where their audiences are across the open internet, while unifying that data to gain transparency into performance. This is how industry solutions like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) are helping marketers drive holistic, omnichannel campaigns that reach consumers in a privacy-conscious way across the fastest-growing channels on the open internet.
Luxury Escapes is one of the many brands in Australia who has seen how UID2 has enhanced their targeting strategies. By activating UID2 on their first party data, they were able to use this data as seed audience to facilitate lookalike targeting. This approach allowed them to identify and direct their advertising to net-new customers who may share similar traits with their existing customers across the open internet. As such, Luxury Escapes saw a 276% higher conversion rate (CVR), 4.75 times higher return on ad spend (ROAS) and 78.3% lower cost per action (CPA) compared with targeting using cookies.
With UID2, global brands can start with authenticated data, enrich that with their own and third-party data to find the right relevant audience.
Don’t leave it too late
Australia’s biggest and most forward-looking brands are already moving on from the antiquated cookie and creating partnerships to future proof their businesses. But this isn’t something that only the big brands need to look at. All marketers should be considering the role of data and privacy in a post-cookie world, the potential of building authenticated audiences using new identity approaches and the value of optimisation with an omnichannel strategy.
By doing so, they can and will continue to make progress down a more successful path as we all welcome a cookieless future.
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Stephanie Famolaro is senior business development director, The Trade Desk. She is responsible for leading the Business Development team in Australia and New Zealand and spearheading the API/Platform Customisation initiative across Asia Pacific.
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Top image: Stephanie Famolaro