Insights Programmatic

Preparing for cookie-less advertising.

about 2 years ago by Matheus Maier

Google is blocking 3rd party cookies in mid-2023 affecting the way marketers gather data on consumer behavior and scale campaigns. Cookies gave us an easy and affordable way to segment audiences and how consumer shop online. A cookie-less world forces advertisers to search for new ways to gather data to optimize campaign KPIs.

Candidates now will have to learn and adapt to collect data in a privacy-safe way and using new tools that are surfacing in the market to approach customer engagement. This will give them an edge at every stage of their job search. Interesting initiatives such as FLoC (proposed by Google itself) and Unified ID 2.0 are amongst the most valuable ones for candidates to learn in this new world of programmatic advertising.

Candidates with a keen eye for internal strategies, which would save agencies and brands from spending on external solutions, will take the lead on any interview process from now on as this is clearly the future for this advertising practice, given how easy and relatively cheap it was before. Candidates seem acutely aware of such changes and are updating their skill sets to stay on trend with how quickly performance marketing pivots into new directions.

For programmatic marketers, whether on platform or planning, audience strategy was never so important so addressing this impending change is vital for any candidate that wants to score their dream job whether on agency, publisher or brand side.

We asked Van Ngo, Regional VP of Trading from MiQ how the future looks without cookies, and she gave us an interesting insight.

How will a cookie-less landscape affect the way programmatic advertisers allocate their spending coin?

While spend will still go towards walled garden such as Meta, Amazon, Google [where the publisher handles all the buying, serving, tracking, and reporting] due to their ability to identify users on multiple displays at once, advertisers will continue to push for more transparency by diversifying part of investments toward open web and independent partners.

How can a team of marketers take the lead against competitors in this new privacy-safe way of collecting audience data?

All brands will want to tap into their CRM first before paying for the extra cost to reach ideal consumers and being able to present a strategy mix of prospecting and re-engaging people through CRM enablement.

If marketers take time to understand the challenges that the different players (publishers, internet providers, brands, buying platforms, etc.) face in the media ecosystem, they can plan ahead and offer solutions to what they know they will find useful.

Lastly, as well as building targeted solutions for short-term gaps quickly, marketing departments should also invest into data infrastructure and governance to hold key data, securely.

On a hiring front, what are the new skills you look for in candidates to overcome the lack of the easy and cost-effective cookies?

A candidate with a consumer mindset and some basic CRM knowledge will get noticed if they can demonstrate their understanding of how a product or service can be activated across different digital media channels. [Understanding how to read the available data was never so important for candidates looking into growing in the programmatic space].