Today, marketers have to juggle third-party cookie loss and new data privacy legislation, impacting their ability to identify customers and create a strong data foundation

IAC’s Dotdash acquires Meredith in a $2.7 billion deal: The move demonstrates that publishers see value in building deep verticalized content brands, hastened by the demise of the third-party cookie.

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.

As we transition to a cookieless world, creativity is becoming more important than ever. People-based creative personalization such as dynamic creative and dynamic product ads (DPA) are the north star in how we deliver quality individualized experiences. Finite targeting doesn’t need to come at the cost of poor creative. Creative innovation equals greater impact.

The latter type of offering will be affected by the identity crisis—ID resolution is necessary for retailers to recognize users across other properties, and that will have to be cookieless in the future. Digiday has reported, for example, that Amazon is working on a cookieless identifier for Amazon DSP to use to continue targeting Amazon users as they browse other sites. Recommendations.

Brands eagerly jump on the retail media network bandwagon: As access to customer data becomes a priority for brands, retailers see an opportunity to diversify their revenue streams.

We spoke with Jürgen Galler, co-founder and CEO at data management platform 1plusX, about how the use of AI by publishers can help them traverse these challenges.

eMarketer was pleased to moderate a Tech-Talk Webinar featuring Exponea (acquired by Bloomreach)'s Martin Simo, product marketing manager. He discussed how brand marketers can take decisive action and develop a successful data strategy in a post-cookie world.

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 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 a mid-2021 Adobe survey, 37% of marketers said they are “very prepared” for the cookieless future; 41% believed they will need as many as two years to get ready.

Google's Chrome wasn't the first browser to put the kibosh on third-party cookies. Phil Acton, country manager for the UK, Benelux, and France at end-to-end programmatic platform Adform, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss how the company has been testing cookieless targeting with publishers in Europe, where Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox have significant market share, as well as the importance of supply path optimization (SPO).

On today's episode, we discuss Google's recent announcement not to build alternative user-level identifiers or support them in their ad stack. How does this change the upcoming cookieless landscape, how does FloC fit in, and how might these changes affect consumer privacy? We then talk about whether The Trade Desk's investments may help it better compete with Google, Facebook lifting its political ad ban, engagement with misinformation on social media, and what to make of The Walt Disney Co.'s new ad exchange. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin.

“I don’t know if marketers are quite yet ready for the cookieless world, since they’ve been preoccupied with getting their lead generation back after COVID-19,” Linton said. “Paid media has been a key part of that recovery, but when the cookieless world begins, you won’t be able to track that spend as well.”

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 email address is the most common form of personal information that web publishers collect from users and can be used as the basis of a cookieless identifier (e.g., a hashed email). Many publishers already employ authentication strategies, but they’ll become even more prevalent to enable user-level targeting on publisher sites in a cookieless future.

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

Third, the industry is working toward a cookieless world, and this evolution has given rise to contextual targeting. This allows audiences to be targeted precisely and at scale and ensures ads are placed next to relevant content. Has traditional media been able to win back some ground as a result of these challenges for digital media?

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.

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 media industry has been busy establishing cookieless advertising solutions designed to drive advertising outcomes for marketers while offering media owners better data security and consumers increased privacy. (Re)Enter contextual targeting. Traditional contextual targeting was built on the premise of providing a marketer with content categories that best match brand advertising objectives.

Twitter Click ID is also a crucial part of its direct-response objectives as the cookieless future nears. Reply Conversation Settings Extended to Advertisers. In March, Twitter extended access to its conversation settings option to advertisers, meaning brands can now control who is able to respond to their Promoted Tweets, Twitter ads, and organic tweets.