People's consumption of media and information is continuously changing, in turn raising new challenges and opportunities for advertisers who want to engage with them. Mobile devices are the new champions at capturing people’s attention and have seen a steep and steady rise to become the go-to devices to access the internet.
The Millward Brown Adreaction 2014 study identifies that combined with tablet minutes, mobile devices now take up to 47% of screen time of multi-screen consumers. With this increase of consumer time being spent in environments where 3rd party cookies can only be utilised in a limited capacity it is presenting headaches for companies that have built their livelihoods on cookie technology.
Digital advertising giants are currently in the middle of a gold rush to find a new cross-device solution whilst their tried and tested currency, the cookie is quickly crumbling. A search for the demise of the cookie within any ad tech news site will pull up numerous articles on the decreasing value of a 3rd party cookie and will highlight new device ID technology and cross device user experiences being created by the likes of Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon and more.
More and more people are blocking cookies in their web browsers, some browsers such as Apple's Safari automatically block 3rd party cookies and there are new ways to access information or buy products that do not handle cookies at all.
This all contributes to the reduction of cookie data available.
Digital marketers rely on data to make decisions. To-date this data has mainly been stored at the cookie level. Cookies are gold to many different types of businesses within the digital ad tech ecosystem - DSP, SSP, data providers, analytic companies, CRM providers, audience targeting companies. All of these companies use cookies to associate a type of behaviour or action that can be stored and then acted upon.
Ad tech companies pride themselves on innovation and flexibility creating different workarounds to technology challenges. The leading solutions to the crumbling cookie are to create new identifiers that are both probabilistic and deterministic. Probabilistic technology uses multiple common parameters to strongly suggest that the same device and person has probably been found and deterministic technology uses a persistent recogniser such as e-mail address, social media login, Android ID, amongst others.
Both probabilistic and deterministic models currently work alongside a cookie to serve a similar purpose of giving marketers and marketing companies information about someone's behaviour. At Affectv we strongly believe that this now needs to happen across multiple device to understand a full consumer journey. Unless you are Facebook, Google or Amazon a pure deterministic model is challenging to create at scale. We are building out a solution that looks to blend cookies in with a probabilistic identifier.
These emerging alternatives are now presenting a number of privacy and security questions.
How much information should a company be able to hold about a person and for how long? What level of personal disclosure is too personal? Who should regulate this and can it be regulated? How do differing views on privacy by country impact on policy and regulation? How we as an industry tackle these questions will widely set the tone for how widely accepted these new solutions will be with the end consumer and, in turn, brands.
Whilst the doom and gloom about the demise of the third party cookies has been widely publicised in the last few years, I feel they will still be a critical facet of the web ecosystem for some time to come. Companies that only rely on cookies as their main data source and are not working on alternative ways of understanding people's behaviour in apps and other non-cookie environments need to be taking action now to protect their business.
Using a combination of cookies and the new Gold of device identification will give marketers the information they need to communicate the right message, at the right time, to the right person. Creating a policy that is considerate of the consumer is one that will provide longevity to alternate and complementary solutions to cookies.
By Sam Finegan, Head of Mobile at Affectv.
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