The tracking cookie continues to crumble. Firefox and Safari already block tracking cookies by default, and now Google’s Chrome browser has joined the third-party-cookie-blocking fray. Google is set to ban third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2021, potentially creating a huge disruption to the digital advertising industry.
For the uninitiated – here is the timeline of how things unfolded
Google Chrome has around 60% of the market share for browsers, so this change will have a huge impact on the digital marketing industry. The marketers who have not gone back to the drawing board to plan for an overhaul of digital marketing strategy will need to wake up now and smell the coffee.
Will it hurt?
So, what does this mean for Publishers and other players in the ad spend business, some serious business implications? Of course, we see programmatic spending being affected, as a majority of the DSPs have huge billing coming from programmatic buying, with a majority if not all backed by 3rd party cookies – McKinsey suggests, in the US alone the publishing industry will have to replace US$ 10 billion worth of Ad revenue.
What's down the road?
The Industry aims to fight back or provide reasonable alternatives, Google’s federated learning of cohorts ( FLOC) is an initiative aimed at minimizing the impact on publishers and other payers, while of course, we don’t see a one final API coming to every bodies rescue like Popeyes spinach.
There will be controversy across platforms, as these new initiatives will try and derive a behavioural credit score, and eminent watchdogs like the office of the AG, state of California which published California consumer privacy might decry, it shall be difficult navigating this.
While many expect Google to provide a replacement and introduce new individual user tracking to replace third-party cookies, David Temkin, Google’s director of product management for ads privacy and trust says “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our product.”
Is there spinach for marketeers to push through this maze?
Well, we have a few predictions of budgets :
- Budgets shifting to walled gardens within the social media behemoths.
- Brands hurrying to find value in directly engaging with their consumers, thereby laying the seeds to allocate considerable dollar buys on first-party data.
- Allocation to move to contextual targeting from behavioural targeting.
- A significant movement of budget to Influencer marketing which with advanced AI and content mapping, will enable companies to serve contextual targeting.
- Data drove marketing for high consumer consideration companies like packaged goods, automobiles and pharma.
So why are we saying all of this, because the cheese will move?
We believe media dollar spends will be reallocated, we also firmly believe that any medium that is allocated for must have the ability to truly align brand communication with consumer interests within the privacy walls to navigate.
Having said that, what next for advertisers and brands in Indonesia our main market – some simple closing points
- Drive efforts to derive value from keyword tracking in your IM campaigns which is another way to analyze and predict consumer behaviour as well as identify the relevant consumer, and Influencer marketing will be best placed to deliver the result to the marketers.
- Lay strong emphasis on having teams align with the right partners drive marketing strategies like influencer marketing which will provide them with a niche-specific target audience and try and build first party data basis IM partner’s ability to harness Influencer’s data points of earlier communications with followers and business done.
- As the industry enters this new era of digital integrity, Influencers who are leading the decentralization of media and Influencer marketing will take center stage as Millennials and Gen-Z respond and look up to influencers for a recommendation rather than produced ads.
RIP third-party cookies.
Rise and Shine Influencers - Your Time Has Come!!
BeTagged, the publisher of this article is driving the dialogue between Industry leaders, marketers, and other stakeholders to lead the movement of budgets from third party cookie world to the world of Influencer marketing and fine-tune the returns from Influencer marketing.