LAS VEGAS — As a confectioner, Mars doesn’t necessarily want to quit on cookies – at least, not the kind you can eat.

But digital cookies, the traditional identifiers used to profile audiences, are being deprecated nonetheless.

For advertisers like Ron Amram, Sr. Director, Global Media at Mars, that poses a challenge.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Amram suggests that AI is becoming a powerful tool to solve challenges traditionally handled manually.

A Shift from Cookies to AI

“(Google’s) Chrome is slowly peeling out cookies. For us, it’s a matter of testing and applying a host of different tools and technology to fill back in the needs and keep the fidelity and capability for targeting and effectiveness”, Amram says.

He highlights the need to explore various solutions such as Google Sandbox, publisher data, second-party data, and scaling first-party data.

Google has taken an on-again, off-again approach to cookie deprecation. Amram believes the delay in Chrome’s move away from cookies has been beneficial. “It allowed us to get our house in order a bit, prioritize building our own first-party data and testing the scaling of our own data,” he says.

This pause has also provided an opportunity to revisit strategies like contextual targeting and pairing different data sets to create audience pools.

The Power of AI in Digital Campaigns

In addition to these strategies, Amram is also interested in the role of AI in digital advertising. “The advent of AI as it’s come in has become quite a powerful way to solve these solutions,” he notes.

“AI unlocks a lot of it, so I think the technology has gotten to a place that we feel confident that we’ll have a couple of different approaches going forward that maybe fill this gap.”

He argues that AI is showing promise in improving many aspects of media buying. “The ability to scale audiences in an automated way with just limited data samples, AI can run pretty quick and can learn very fast in a way that we were not able to do before,” he explains.

Breaking Down Silos for Effective Marketing

When asked about who should take the lead in transitioning away from cookies, Amram points out that the process impacts every aspect of a marketing organization – media teams, data teams and creative teams alike.

He stresses the need to “tear down silos” between those teams.

Amram also underscores the importance of privacy compliance. “We do believe that privacy is imperative for our customers, and we don’t have an issue with any of the legislation about it,” he says. “Our point is simply use data that is privacy compliant and the imperative there is to build it and prove it and scale it.”

They were interviewed by Mike Shields, CEO, Shields Strategic Consulting.

You’re watching “Preparing For The End of Third-Party Cookies,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at CES 2024, presented by TripleLift.
For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews