Justin Rosenberg, CEO and founder of honeygrow, speaks with eMarketer vice president of business development Marissa Coslov about flipping its dining-in model to 100% mobile app orders with the help of third-party delivery providers.

Crypto exchange Bitpanda—which recently opened a B2B arm—raised $263M, as investors continue to target players that provide infrastructure to third parties.

This advantage is only becoming more important as the digital ad industry hurtles toward a future free of third-party tracking cookies, where consumer consent for ad targeting and tracking is a necessity. Amazon is one of just a handful of digital ad players in the world with billions of logged-in users.

Now, increasing restrictions on data collection, changes to Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), and the death of the third-party cookie will mean that winning brands must reduce their dependence on third parties, and place a greater focus on first-party data and owned channels. In short, they’ll need more direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketing, and less (though still plenty) advertising.

eMarketer was pleased to moderate a Tech-Talk Webinar featuring Infutor Data Solutions' Zora Senat, senior vice president, marketing and partnerships, and Ross Epstein, vice president, new projects at SafeGraph, for this Tech-Talk Webinar. They discussed how first- and third-party data can be combined to increase customer engagement.

Data is critical in marketing and advertising, but navigating between points of activation can be complex and prohibitive. With the end of the third-party cookie, this challenging journey through the infrastructure of the data-driven media ecosystem is about to become even more difficult.

In a recent Acxiom survey across eight industries, 91% of businesses agreed that partners are imperative to getting the most out of first-, second- and third-party data. But more than half also admit that combining this data for more relevant marketing is difficult.

eMarketer was pleased to moderate a Tech-Talk Webinar featuring Salesforce's Kathy Baxter, architect, ethical AI practice. She discussed how to use AI marketing to build customer trust as the third-party cookie deprecates and marketers must collect data directly.

Rather than blindly relying on third-party brand safety mechanisms baked into programmatic exchanges, brands should look at other indicators for quality and develop direct relationships with publishers.

“The things we were already seeing—marketers moving to first-party data and trying to move away from third-party tracking cookies and third-party data are just going to carry on, and if anything, become amplified,” Cheetah Digital’s Jones said. The pandemic does, however, present several important implications and opportunities for marketers as they plan for a post-COVID world.