The writing is on the wall for one of the main ways marketers have used to targeted audiences. So what comes next?
“Cookies”, small files on devices which contain client-side information about users which sites can access, were already facing a challenge from the way that modern consumers now use digital media – which is to say, via a multitude of devices.
And new moves are rendering the cookie toothless:
- ITP 2.1 from Apple purges most first-party cookies after seven days and blocks all third-party cookies by default, rendering device fingerprinting and long-tail measurement nearly impossible.
- Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, which stops third-party cookies, turning on by default.
- Google has since declared it will phase out all third-party cookies from the Chrome browser by 2022.
“Today as it stands in the United States, only 44% of all impressions have cookies associated with them, which means that well over half of them do not,” says Jim Daily, the North America CEO for Teads, an ad-tech firm whose software allows publishers to insert video ads in text material.
“What that means is no cookie-based targeting optimizations, no multi-touch attribution, no frequency capping.
“There needs to be a change in how we’re targeting as an industry.”
Daily spotlights two of the candidates to replace cookies as vital targeting technology…
IP based solutions:
“We can target at the household level based on the authenticated IP address and see what type of programmes (people) are watching and target a specific programmer to those households that might be heavy consumers of a competitive product. And then we can track on the back if they actually tuned it or not.”
Contextual data mining:
“Our AI has been, I’m seeing every ad impression we’re delivering associating the brand and that impression to the context of the article in which it’s being delivered and determining which content performs best for what type of advertisers.”
