Early September 2024, a very nice panel for the MMTech event of Media Marketing on the future of advertising without cookies.
Cookies are nearly dead, but what's the alternative, what are the bigger stakes? A few highlights of the talks:
- Cookies are clearly from the past. Solutions already exists to replace them based on your first-party data (aka email adresses, mobile IDs, ...).
- Universal identifiers are emerging to help advertisers track and target users across devices and platforms. Growing fast in France, Netherlands ... but still in early phase for Belgium. We need an agreement between the publishers/sales houses to share their readers/users information on a national level to have a critical mass of users where other players could join (telco, retailers ...) to have a larger overview of Belgian internet users.
- Political/strategic barriers from publishers pushing their own solutions (aka walled gardens) are difficult to counter. BAM - Belgian Association of Marketing as representative of IAB Europe is launching discussions on this topic soon.
- There is a big urgency for this as a large part (~70%) of the media budget of advertisers is going to big & international players (Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok) which limits the support of the open web. Critical to have free and independent content available outside the big platforms.
- The goal for publishers is to create a simple and national solution that can compete with Google & Meta & the others. They are very good at showing the ROI of the campaigns in their stack/walled garden which is a good advantage to convince advertisers to invest even more at the expense of open (and often cheaper) alternatives.
- Without a good targeting, CPM on the open web is 60-70% cheaper --> financial balance of the open web is at risk if we can't find an easy and efficient alternative to 3rd party cookies
- With cookies + adblockers + apple blocking tracking + ... advertisers will have more limited ways to measure the performance of digital campaigns on the open web. Another reason to push for a simple and common solution (universal identifiers) for supporting the open web in the future. Increasing the share of the pie for the open web is the goal at the end.
As advertiser, those changes are deep-rooted shifts that will shape the future of advertising. Make sure to have a great and well-prepared first-party data strategy as foundation for future successes. 🚀 At Saturn, we can help and review your first-party data strategy. Let's discuss together and elevate your digital maturity for a more customer-centric approach.
Thanks Marc Bresseel from Utiq, CATHERINE HUBAUT from Biggie Benelux, Michael Froment from Commanders Act & François-Xavier Le Ray from The Trade Desk for this inspiration and this necessary step back.