How Cookie deprecation will impact your Data Strategy?

Adgully is bringing a series of articles and interactions as part of Digital Unplugged - Zenith Insights over the next few months. Presented by Zenith, the thought series is part of the Cookieless Future initiative, wherein Zenith envisages the changes and opportunities that arise out of Google announcing that it will phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. How can advertisers prepare for a cookieless future? Read on to find out.

Cookie, a small piece of text code, took the advertising world by storm when the news of its deprecation came in. While some advertisers were relieved with the breaking news flashing on their mobile devices of Google’s announcement to extend the deprecation of Third Party Cookies by 2023, we were hard at work to minimise its impact for our advertisers.

Also read: Cookie-less Future: Time to make it a part of your Annual Planning

You may ask how and what will be the impact. There are three clear areas assessed:

By now, the headline itself and a few seconds into reading the article would have raised many questions – How will my planning data change? Will I be able to retarget? What is first-party and third-party data?, and many more…

Let us break this down for you with focus on DATA. And it’s important to begin by outlining data definitions to ensure that the proper procedures are being applied when vetting these data sets.

Zero-Party Data: is owned by a specific advertiser and is collected through explicit interests and preferences. This data is given in exchange for benefits from an advertiser.
First-Party Data: is any data owned by, or unique to, a specific advertiser. This may include data collected from advertising, websites, owned apps, conversion data, CRM, point of sale data, etc.
Second-Party Data: is someone else’s first-party data that is sold to an advertiser for targeting or analytics. This data is often a unique data asset that is not widely available across the digital ecosystem.
Third-Party Consumer Data: is collected by third-party data aggregators, analyzed for consumer characteristics, and sold to advertisers for targeting purposes. This data is aggregated from a large array of sources.

Each of these data sets impact how we identify our audiences and plan currently. While first and second party data sets remain mostly unaffected, Third-party cookie deprecation, or as some may call it the “crumbling of Third-party data” is the biggest area of impact.

The high dependency on data collection and exchange third-party data has will get severely impacted:

Device-Based Behavioral

Partners who collected device IDs on mobile/ tablet and/ or CTV IDs via sources that can include: app ownership, CTV behaviour, proximity location targeting, and historical location (MAIDS only)

Onboarded Behavioral

Third-party data providers leverage onboarders to match PII IDs into targetable cookies and device IDs via data sources that can include any transactional and panel/ survey-based data

Web Behavioral

Third-party providers use website data collected through third-party pixels, these data types include: web interest, web retargeting and survey/ panel based.

Worry not, there’s always a silver lining. What will not be impacted, and you’ll see players already in the market with this solution: “Contextual Advertising”. These are targeted ads to pages that fall into pre-assigned categories or match specific keywords. Contextual targeting leverages cookieless meta data used for indirect environment targeting and thus will not be impacted.

While we hear the slogan of “Long live the first-party data”, there are forms of the same which will get impacted and should be on the radar while creating data strategy:

Brand-Owned Device IDs: This is data collected from a brand’s app and also includes any of the app’s events (opened, lapsed, frequency, purchases, etc.)

Onboarded Data: Onboarding partners used to match legacy PII such as email addresses into third-party cookies for targeting. Onboarding partners are in the midst of trying to find new identifiers to help minimize the impact.

Pixel-Based Behavioral: This is data collected by third-party pixels via DMP, DSPs, or an ad server. This includes any data from a DSP web retargeting pixel and/or a DMP media re-messaging pixel.

These early assessments with partners have helped us craft data strategies to ensure we are FUTURE READY with RELIANT DATA in the cookieless era. And we continue to keep our sights on this ever-evolving stream.

My parting thoughts to consider for your strategy –

Create a first-party data ecosystem for future proofing
Test and learn with contextual targeting tactics

(Authored by Rashmi Sehgal, Digital Transformation Lead, Zenith)