Marketers, media need to train smarter for the cookieless marathon: Opinion

Now that third-party cookies will survive until 2023, you can relax and prioritize all the things you abandoned in the sprint to alternatives. Or you can feel justified in waiting to act. Right? No way. If you’ve ever trained for a marathon, you know there’s only one way to successfully complete a race: with consistent, disciplined training. If you train too hard, too fast, too sporadically, or not at all, injury ends your race before it begins. While three-quarters of U.S. advertisers told us in April that they felt prepared to address the end of cookies, only 40% of them had already audited their reliance on third-party data and estimated the business impact of elimination. Those elite forerunners have created a significant advantage. Their first-party data strategies are more mature. They’re actively engaged with Google, industry organizations and measurement partners to identify alternatives. And they’re putting alternate audience authentication, targeting and measurement solutions into practice. While the elite hone their conditioning, everyone else has a chance to get in gear. The training sequence is simple and proven: Identify your limits: Audit, audit, audit You can’t train properly until you know where you’re weak. So, audit all of your current audience segmentation, targeting and measurement practices that currently do and don’t rely on third-party data. That tells you where to move forward, where to take a step back and which partners you will need to win. Feed your first-party data strategy Both U.S. advertisers and publishers see first-party data strategy as the key to maintaining individual customer relationships through personalized communication. Yet only one in 10 of the advertisers we polled said their first-party data strategy was very mature. Google’s extension affords the time to get it right. That means balance, not gorging on customer information. The audit tells you what data is worth collecting. Keep your focus on the ultimate race Choose partners to augment and extend your first-party data strategies based on how they can address future privacy regulation. If there’s any question about the longevity of solutions or privacy compliance, think twice. Cross-train with contextual targeting First-party data is the fuel to run long, but smart advertisers are doing contextual targeting to maintain ad performance. Half of advertisers are already using contextual targeting in combination with their current practices to benchmark performance and test alternate solutions. Advertisers can use the Google extension to test and iterate contextual, interest-based, cohort-based and other types of targeting. And publishers need to use the time to expand on what contextual targeting is and what it can do. Build mental stamina with measurement When you’re straining late in a race, it’s mental stamina that keeps your legs moving. Advertisers need to make the uncomfortable changes and compromises now, so they aren’t derailed in the home stretch. This means trying different measurement and mix modeling techniques and reeducating executives: It’s not another team’s job, and the organization can learn to approach marketing in a new way. It also means letting data partners and media into the tent to help design reliable paths forward. Google’s extension isn’t a time to rest. It’s a time to commit to the consistent training that winning in the cookieless world will require. There’s no substitute for complete preparedness, and how you train is how you’ll run.

Marketers, media need to train smarter for the cookieless marathon: Opinion

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