From the growth of TikTok and of social commerce to the challenges of brand safety and the cookieless future, 2021 will be another year of big stories for social media.

eMarketer was pleased to moderate a Tech-Talk Webinar featuring Adobe's Ryan Fleisch, head of product marketing, Real-Time CDP, and Audience Manager. He unpacked the understanding and readiness level of advertisers and publishers for a cookieless future, the impact to their use cases, and their perception of the wider ecosystem.

The survey also found advertisers expect a number of measurement and research techniques to become more important in a cookieless world, including sales-lift research, ad effectiveness research, and media mix modeling.

According to July 2020 research by Advertiser Perceptions, 65% of US marketers and agencies surveyed thought campaign reporting and insights would be among the most challenging phases of ad campaigns in a cookieless environment.

The rise of CTV has meant only more digital time spent in cookieless environments.

The cookieless future has also hastened advertisers’ shift toward PMPs. “As uncertainty over programmatic took hold among advertisers, we initially saw a trend toward investment in [private] marketplaces, where there is less dependency on cookies,” said Emma Delserieys, director of customer success and attribution for EMEA at Nielsen.

CTV apps are a cookieless environment (like mobile apps), and CTV devices are often shared by a household, making it difficult to tell who is watching at any given time. Additionally, a significant portion of CTV advertising is not decisioned on a real-time, impression-level basis. Large chunks of spending come from upfront or other long-term commitments as part of programmatic guaranteed deals.

The survey also found advertisers expect a number of measurement and research techniques to become more important in a cookieless world, including sales-lift research, ad effectiveness research, and media mix modeling.

Digital trends to track in 2021—Big Tech's (non)break-up, the future of TikTok, first-party data in a cookieless world, the rise of retail media, and more! An eMarketer viewpoint on what each trend means for marketers and why. Plus! Bill Stratton, head of the media and advertising vertical at Snowflake joins the conversation. PRESENTERS.

Today’s consumers find positive brand experiences more influential than advertising. Now more than ever before, marketers must forge the right relationships to make the identifiable consumer connections necessary to compete in a cookieless world.

The cookieless future has also hastened advertisers’ shift toward PMPs. “As uncertainty over programmatic took hold among advertisers, we initially saw a trend toward investment in [private] marketplaces, where there is less dependency on cookies,” said Emma Delserieys, director of customer success and attribution for EMEA at Nielsen.

How to manage customer identity for actionability in a cookieless world. The tradeoffs between using customer data platforms, data management platforms, and master data management solutions. Examples of how companies are already making the transformation. PRESENTERS. Eric Gilreath is a customer success engineer at BlueConic.

According to a September 2020 Advertiser Perceptions survey of more than 300 marketers and agencies, sales-lift research ranked as the measurement approach most likely to increase in importance in a cookieless world (44%). This favors walled gardens—including all major social platforms—because their measurement pixels enable cookieless attribution measurement.

The Chrome team’s January 2020 announcement to that effect was just one in a long series of events making it more difficult for marketers to target and measure their digital ads, including the passage of regulations like the EU’s GDPR and the CCPA in the US, but it felt official: The cookieless future is coming, and something must be done to prepare.

Melissa Sargeant, CMO of Litmus, agreed, adding that digital marketing is entering a cookieless future “even faster than we thought it would.” She believes this amplifies the value for techniques like email marketing, given that they are permission-based in nature. What Makes an Email Program Best in Class?

Along with the cookieless future, measures like the CCPA are putting a damper on audience targeting—it’s highly unlikely that all consumers will consent to targeting by all publishers or advertisers, and alternatives including greater ability to target ads contextually will continue to be developed. Antitrust. Facebook’s large share of the display ad market has been evident throughout this report.

But as consumers spend greater amounts of time—and advertisers, more ad dollars—in cookieless environments such as in-app and even connected TV, limitations to using third-party cookies have grown. But this is one of the very reasons identity graphs have become more commonplace—to marry cookies with device IDs and even offline data sets.