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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Marketers are up against the looming cookieless future, evolving privacy regulations, fragmented customer data—and the accelerating complexities of identity management. There’s also the ever-changing expectations of business customers and consumers alike. What do marketing and IT leaders need to empower their customer experience (CX) ambitions?

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.

Audio: The Ad Platform: Testing cookieless targeting with Safari and Firefox traffic. Article: Amazon eyes malls to expand distribution network. Article: Amazon’s share of the US digital ad market surpassed 10% in 2020.

Experimenting with alternatives to third-party cookies will continue to be a priority for the digital advertising industry in 2021, as the cookieless era draws closer. With Chrome expected to deprecate third-party cookies next year, 2021 will be an important year for media buyers and publishers to test and finalize their approach to a cookieless future.

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.

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.

“As much as publishers can lean into understanding all these different approaches to dealing with the cookieless future, I think the better off they’ll be,” he added.

For years, consumers have spent the majority of their digital media time in the cookieless environments known as mobile apps. Still, cookies were useful—along with IDFAs—and losing identifiers will disrupt many current practices.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.