It finally has begun: On Jan. 4, Google disabled third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome, or roughly 30 million users. The move represents the first tangible step in the search giant’s plan to phase out the tracking technology for all users in the second half of the yr — a change that can eliminate a long-standing digital promoting tool.
With the announcement nearly 4 years ago that it will eventually kill the third-party cookie, Google set into motion a race for the promoting industry to construct, test and adopt alternative targeting and tracking methods, whether using its Privacy Sandbox proposals or those crafted by other players.
But while a panoply of different IDs, identity graphs and data clean room solutions have cropped up in recent years, the missing piece in solving the post-cookie problem could be an application of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the buzzy technology that has captivated the worlds of promoting, technology and general culture for greater than a yr.
“To treatment the rift of third-party cookie depreciation, it’s crucial for marketers to lean into AI to supercharge strategies utilizing zero- and first-party consumer data,” said Anjali Yakkundi, vice chairman of product marketing at Movable Ink, in emailed comments.
“AI can analyze consumers’ digital behavior like browsing history, purchasing patterns and engagement to offer deeper audience understanding while creating tailored experiences,” the executive added. “Moreover, brands can expand AI and ML inside predictive models that garner insights into consumers’ likely next steps, allowing for proactive and strategic development of outputs that meet the consumer where they’re before they even know they’re going to be there.”
The power of AI
Much of promoting’s concentrate on generative AI so far has centered on the ability to create text and image assets that might be produced quickly and help marketers meet longtime goals around personalization-at-scale. But the ability of AI to sift through and analyze data with incredible speed and accuracy could help marketers make up for the signal loss created by cookie deprecation.
“2024 goes to be the true rise and scaling of additional intent signals,” said Lynda Clarizio, a media industry veteran and co-founder of early stage enterprise capital firm The 98. “For a protracted time, we’ve had web-tracking intent and social intent. Now we’re going to have the rise of transaction intent and contextual intent.”
Generative AI needs three things to work, in response to experts: proprietary first-party data, the infrastructure to process that data and data scientists to develop the data to coach latest models. As applied to promoting, those requirements will put tech players like Google and Amazon in the “driver’s seat,” Clarizio said.
“We’re really ‘Back to the Future,’” Clarizio explained, connecting the rise of digital walled gardens to the previous walled gardens in TV promoting.
“Now we’re going back in the other direction, and a few of that has been due to deprecation of cookies and the inability to make use of data signals in a broader way,” Clarizio added. “You’re really restricted to first-party data, which is sensible from a privacy perspective but reinforces the strength of a few of these larger players.”
However, other players are starting to leverage generative AI, using the tech for search re-ranking in a quick, effective way and to deliver a more robust, personal experience to users. Other use cases of the technology are still being developed.
“AI will turn out to be more prevalent as agencies and talent find practical applications to scale back costs and speed up processes,” said Rob Davis, CMO and president of independent agency Novus, in emailed comments. “This will expand beyond media optimization and data compilation — for instance, applying generative AI to simulated focus groups for cost-effective insight generation.”
The race for data and identifiers continues
The death of the cookie can be a significant test of efforts to accumulate marketing first-party data, in addition to zero- and second-party data, in a privacy-safe way. A continued push for data could encourage brands, agencies and publishers to ascertain more data co-ops that allow entities to share data that may then be used to fuel generative AI efforts.
“I’ve been on the lookout for a protracted time for the rise of information co-ops that actually take first-party data from different web properties and mix that together to rival something that Google does,” Clarizio said. “Maybe you’ll see more of that in 2024 because generative AI will enhance the ability to create that. It’s like identity graphs on steroids.”
Along with solving for marketing first-party data, the industry in 2024 can even must contend with a still-fragmented landscape of different ID providers, including The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, LiveRamp’s RampID and dozens more, which might be jockeying for market share and offering different use cases.
“If you’re a buyer, it’s just mass confusion,” said Eli Heath, head of identity at Lotame, which offers the Panorama ID. “Part of this has resulted in paralysis, since it’s like, ‘What do I take advantage of? Is there going to be a winner-takes-all?’”
Marketers mustn’t expect one ID to rule all of them. Instead, they may likely must coordinate behavior-based addressability and contextual strategy in quite a lot of ways, Heath said.
“It’s really going to be a basket approach, not only inside the cookieless identifier spaces, but in addition in the general strategies and tactics that you just deploy inside programmatic,” the executive added. “I actually think it is going to be throughout the place.”
Pushing back on Google
Along with ad-tech and agency-based solutions for data and identifiers, marketers in 2024 will still must grapple with the elephant in the room, Google. If the company’s latest timeline holds, there continues to be much work to be done before the second half of the yr, and still more questions than answers around verification, measurement and attribution, in response to Paul Bell, president of ad-tech firm 33Across.
“Once the buy-side sees results that might be measured by marketers and/or a trusted third party (i.e. not only Google), Google and the market can confidently move beyond 1%,” Bell said in emailed comments. “To make this transition smooth, Google needs to make sure partners that they’ll tie their marketing dollars back to a trusted conversion metric. Based on the amount of promoting dollars and the variety of partners they should put relaxed, this timeline feels aggressive.”
To assuage concerns a couple of cookieless future, Google has continued to develop its Privacy Sandbox proposals. Throughout the process, many groups have pushed back on Google’s claims about the effectiveness of its latest offerings. Early tests still display “real challenges,” per the IAB Tech Lab.
In kind, Google has pushed back against a variety of objections to Privacy Sandbox around sufficiency and complexity via a blog post that implies the company is committed to its timeline and plan.
“We consider the current Privacy Sandbox APIs — generally available in Chrome since September — are able to carry the ecosystem right into a more private future. And we’re committed to pushing privacy-preserving technologies forward for years to come back, each in terms of privacy and utility,” wrote Victor Wong, senior director of product management for the Privacy Sandbox.
“There is a wave of motion that’s starting to occur, and I feel reality goes to start out slapping the industry in the face.”
Matt Hertig
CEO, ChannelMix
Still, advertisers mustn’t put all their eggs in the Privacy Sandbox and look to Google — still a dominant player in the market — to be a “savior of the promoting world,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO and co-founder of ID5, in emailed comments.
“It’s necessary to recollect throughout all of this that there are a lot of alternatives including universal IDs, Identity Graphs and Data Clean Rooms which have proven to be effective in cookie-free browsers like Safari and Firefox,” Roche said. “Advertisers only have just a few months left to make sure they’ll effectively engage with their audiences and measure results in the long run.”
The best-prepared marketers is not going to wait any longer to get their cookieless plans in motion. Plus, the second half of 2024 deadline continues to be vague and could occur sooner somewhat than later: Lotame’s Heath predicts that more of the landscape could be cookieless sooner or later in Q3 to not disrupt the critical Q4 ad-buying period.
Advertisers get up
A recent survey conducted for the PrimeAudience ad network found that 88% of U.S. marketers feel confident about cookie deprecation, with greater than half already testing the cookieless future. Still, almost a 3rd do not know the best way to use Google’s Protected Audience API (formerly often called FLEDGE), regardless that 68% plan to make use of the Privacy Sandbox proposal in 2024. Beyond Google, greater than half (53%) of marketers need to AI as a part of their solutions.
“While it’s promising to see U.S. marketers feel confident about their preparation for the cookieless world, there’s a desire to proceed to place effective solutions in place,” said Mateusz Rumiński, PrimeAudience vice chairman of product, in an announcement. “We consider that latest promoting technologies in combination with generative AI and optimal use of first-party data can result in a thriving promoting ecosystem.”
In line with PrimeAudience’s survey, some observers have seen large parts of the ad industry finally wake as much as the reality of what the death of the cookie means to promoting, a shift that can only proceed as the clock ticks down.
“There is a wave of motion that’s starting to occur, and I feel reality goes to start out slapping the industry in the face,” said Matt Hertig, CEO of analytics company ChannelMix. “This might be one in all the most monumental shifts in how we understand marketing’s impact in the past 15 years… and that’s the real excitement that AI can inject back into the marketing analytics space.”
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