It is now only a matter of time: the world of online advertising is approaching the final deprecation of third-party cookies at a steady pace, but for publishers there are still major challenges ahead.
By 2025, barring further extensions by Google, third-party cookies will no longer drive profiling and measurement, but will become publishers’ first-party data as the fundamental cornerstone for both targeting and campaign performance monitoring.
This is a momentous opportunity for publishers to regain a central role, an important paradigm shift that nevertheless hides some critical issues.
Audience addressability: the challenge to overcome
The greatest advantage of the use of third-party cookies in advertising over the years has certainly been the possibility of reaching numerically relevant target audiences.
This is addressability, the possibility of identifying and reaching specific people by means of ADS campaigns.
Addressability, in fact, allows one to understand where and how to engage the target audience of one’s campaigns in order to create high-performance and personalised ads.
Faced with the deprecation of third-party cookies, we can well understand how the issue of addressability becomes crucial.
In this context, the first-party data potentially available to publishers represent an important asset from which to start, but what seems to scare publishers the most is the possibility of “scaling” this data in order to make it numerically relevant for the creation of high-performance ADS campaigns.
In the white paper published by Pubmatic “Audience Addressability: a publisher’s guide” relating to an interview conducted on a sample of around seventy operators in the ad tech and programmatic world, it is highlighted that the possibility to create sets of relevant personally identifiable information (PII) represents the most significant hurdle for more than 61% of respondents, followed by the scalability of ID-based solutions to support programmatic advertising campaigns (53%) and overcoming the difficulties related to tracking and centralised management of user IDs (43%).
Faced with the deprecation of third-party cookies, publishers will thus have to focus on first-party data, creating privacy-compliant strategies that aim to enrich it.
First-party data and addressability: users at the centre of the strategy
Although there is still no one-size-fits-all solution to cope with the end of third-party cookies in terms of addressability, publishers have an opportunity to meet the challenge by investing in their relationship with their audience.
This means understanding what their audience expects and offering the extra something that encourages users to register and authenticate themselves. All this translates into a considerable investment in the quality of the content offer and the creation of valuable personalised experiences.
Publishers must thus fully understand their offer and identify what is valuable to their audience. Once the value is identified, it becomes easier to deploy strategies that enable progressive profiling activities in exchange for interesting content and insights.
Between audience and publisher a true exchange of value is thus realised: the more users perceive the benefits of this exchange, the more they will be inclined to release data and information.
Investing in first-party data and zero-party data and their enrichment has positive repercussions both in terms of addressability and measurability for campaigns, and makes it possible to create profiled and performing audiences because they are based on a relationship of trust and transparency.
Audience addressability: how to increase the value of data with Blendee
First and zero-party data collected from publishers will be the basis for audience targeting activities for advertisers and brands, but the critical issues related to the potential of these audiences in terms of reach will not be negligible.
Blendee’s Marketing Operating System allows the creation of complete single customer views updated in real time by identity resolution processes.
Highly profiled user clusters, but not only. The advantages of a solution such as Blendee’s, which integrates the functions of a modern CDP with those of a high-performance DMP, also lie in the possibility of making your audiences even more powerful.
- Data collaboration activities aimed at acquiring and combining data to improve targeting accuracy in a privacy compliant environment.
- Interactions with other identification systems via data clean room.
- Data enrichment activities through A.I audience profiling.
- Data monetisation.
- Contextual advertising and targeting.
Although necessary, the journey towards post-cookie addressability looks quite complicated for publishers, as, to date, there is no “recipe” to best undertake it. It is a matter of putting together several activities and strategies and testing the best solutions.
At least for the foreseeable future, addressability will continue to be a challenge for publishers, but with the right technology stack, such as Blendee’s madtech overlayer, it will be easier to monetise their audiences even in cookieless and privacy-friendly contexts.
