From banners to search campaigns, from traditional programmatic advertising to more innovative campaigns using cutting-edge media and channels (think CTV or digital out-of-home): over the years, digital advertising has increasingly become an essential element in the marketing mix of brands and companies, thanks to one of its fundamental characteristics, addressability, which is the ability to reach highly specific and targeted audiences.
For over twenty-five years, throughout the growth and development phase of digital advertising, the foundation upon which the addressability of campaigns was built has been third-party cookies.
With the announced deprecation of these cookies and the increasing focus on measures related to the protection and safeguarding of users’ personal data, the advertising world has faced a significant challenge, where addressability appears to be the most complex battleground to win.
- Addressability: what is it and why is it so important?
- Addressability and digital advertising: where to start again?
- Blendee’s approach to addressability
Addressability: What is it and Why is it So Important?
As partly mentioned, the term “addressability” defines the ability to reach, through an advertising campaign, targeted and specific individuals. The value of addressability lies precisely in the possibility of reaching audiences potentially interested in the advertised product/service. This translates into the subsequent possibility of creating high-performing and effective campaigns.
Clear data and an in-depth understanding of your target audience enable the creation of highly personalised messages and the launch of successful campaigns in terms of engagement and revenue.
Before the advent of digital advertising, advertising primarily relied on lists of users for whom the company had at least one contact detail, such as direct marketing or even earlier telemarketing campaigns. Subsequently, thanks mainly to third-party cookies, it became possible to target users who were anonymous and unknown but whose interests, demographic data, and behavioural information could still be intercepted.
The much-anticipated deprecation of third-party cookies now changes the playing field once again and forces marketers and advertisers to revise models and build new addressability strategies.
Addressability and digital advertising: where to start again?
Although the deprecation of third-party cookies is not yet in effect, companies and marketing and advertising industry professionals are already seeking solutions, particularly models, that enable effective addressability activities. Currently, these can be attributed to the following aspects.
First-Party Data
Data provided directly by the user, known as zero-party data, and data collected on company properties are, without a doubt, a reliable starting point for creating targeted audiences.
However, as we can understand, the risk of relying solely on first-party data lies in the often limited reach.
In this regard, data collaboration and audience extension activities represent two opportunities to further profile and extend your audiences.
Unified User ID e Identity Resolution
Identity resolution, the ability to know and, more importantly, recognise each individual user and customer in real-time through the convergence and resolution of different IDs assigned during various interactions across different channels and touchpoints, represents a viable alternative to third-party cookies. This ensures effective campaigns and activities while preserving user privacy
Contextual Advertising and Targeting
With the announced deprecation of third-party cookies, contextual advertising has gained new prominence. Contextual advertising allows for the delivery of targeted ads based on the context in which the user is operating, rather than on their characteristics. Through natural language processing, it is possible to cluster the content of the page the user is browsing, extract their interests based on this, and create vertical target audiences.
Blendee’s Approach to Addressability
In a cookieless future, identity resolution processes and first-party data are likely to be the most successful solutions in the strategies of publishers and advertisers.
Blendee integrates and normalises data from multiple sources at the single customer view level through identity resolution processes, allowing for the unique recognition of each user across various interactions and touchpoints, assigning them a unique ID (Blendee ID).
Specifically, Blendee’s Marketing Operating System also enables:
- data collaboration activities aimed at acquiring and combining data to improve targeting accuracy in a privacy-compliant environment;
- interactions with other identification systems through data clean rooms;
- the use of strong IDs, such as email, for retargeting users on closed ecosystems like Amazon, Google, and Meta;
- the use of privacy–enhanced technologies (such as Google’s Privacy Sandbox, cohort-based profiling, and measurement), which are emerging in the market as solutions to the deprecation of third-party cookies.
Among its audience management features, Blendee offers the ability to create vertical audiences starting from the definition of a set of contexts and keywords to describe the content and interests of users across the network.
Additionally, among its core engines, Blendee’s Marketing Operating System includes an “Ad Server” that allows for the management and optimisation of all types of ad campaigns, delivering engaging and personalised content across multiple platforms.
This is made possible through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, which enhance content classification to deliver increasingly relevant advertising messages.
Third-party cookies have shaped the world of online advertising for years.
Their gradual deprecation and increasingly stringent regulations regarding privacy and personal data processing are revolutionising models and strategies in the advertising and marketing fields.
But as often happens, behind a threat, there is always a great opportunity, and the invitation is always to seize it.
In this particular context, everything that, following the deprecation of third-party cookies, seems like a limitation for companies and operators in the adtech and martech world, could actually turn out to be the lever on which to build their competitive advantage.
The step to take is to move from compliance to data ethics: that is, to consider user data and information as an asset to be protected and valued over time until it becomes a true asset. .
