Nick Dujnic (Speaker) VP Marketing, LiveIntent
Description
There has been much hoopla raised around the impending Cookie Apocalypse, which promises to leave the digital advertising ecosystem in a Mad Max, “Welcome to the Thunderdome-esque” struggle for survival. Google is cracking down on third-party cookies, Apple’s making anti-tracking updates, and Facebook is letting users clear their histories, sending marketers scurrying to figure out how to move forward with less data available for advertising. But as with many things that scare us - like ghosts, death, and Nicolas Cage - the source of the fear comes from a lack of understanding. New digital channels and regulations are added all of the time, but the one thing that does not change is the importance of knowing your audience. Contextual audience profiling, where marketers can smartly and quickly identify the key marketing-personas in their audience will drive meaningful and relevant content creation, and content that is also GDPR-safe for targeting. Once marketers create audience-specific content, then they can use the channel and format du jour using the most relevant platform available to them. Nick Dujnic will share what marketers can do to prepare for a world without cookies, and why the email address is likely to emerge as the most consistent, important channel in the digital marketing mix.
2. about me:
vice president, marketing at
LiveIntent
host of adtech/martech
explainer series
avid collector of graphic t-shirts
and nike sneakers
3. what is the “cookie apocalypse”
and should i be worried?
4. cook·ie (noun)
small JavaScript files of data, each consisting of a name and a value, stored on behalf of
a website by visitors' web browsers, used to identify or track users
a·poc·a·lypse (noun)
an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.
10. Market Share of Cookie-Challenged
Browsers: Pre 2020
Market Share of Cookie-Challenged
Browsers: Post 2020
Source: Statista, Global market share held by leading desktop and mobile internet browsers from January 2015 to December 2018
14. Digital publishers lose
of revenue on average when readers set their web
browsers to block cookies*
Source: Google Ad Team Study conducted in August. 2019
19. “There’s never been total privacy in
commerce. Companies and consumers have
always exchanged information. But as the
Internet amplifies the flow of information,
the need for trust has grown dramatically.”
Harvard Business Review (2000)
25. Social Login
Mobile Device ID
IP Address
Phone Number
Email Address
Most Valuable Piece of Customer Identity Data According to Marketers,
(Forrester Consulting on behalf of LiveIntent, 2017)
of
marketers surveyed said a customer’s
email address was valuable or extremely
valuable to them
26. Survival Tip #1:
Be Your Own Data
Privacy Expert
Survival Tip #2:
Understand How Your
Customers Value Their Data
Survival Tip #3:
Invest in Collecting and
Leveraging 1st-Party Data
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me today to talk a bit about the cookie apocalypse. Fun! Today we’re going to cover what it actually is, what it means for the larger digital marketing and advertising ecosystem as a whole, and how you can bolster your marketing team and strategies to ensure that you’re ready for a post-cookie world.
But first, a little about me – my name is Nick Dujnic, I am the vice president of marketing for LiveIntent – a programmatic advertising and monetization platform for email – where I also host a video series that explains terminology and trends in the marketing and advertising technology space using a combination of plain language and pop-culture metaphors. I am also a big collector of graphic t-shirts and I love my air force ones. So, I actually recently published an episode of my explainer series on this topic, which is kind of a crypt-notes version of this presentation, and one of our sales reps shared it on his Facebook page. And a day later he got an email from his 80 year old aunt asking this question
“what is the cookie apocalypse and should I be worried?” And I thought that was just the best way to start this because many of you are here in this room because you’re asking yourself that very same question. Either that, or you made a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and now you don’t want to be rude. Which I appreciate.
So let’s start with the first part of that question. The cookies we’re referencing here are not your run-of-the mill chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin. No, they are small bits of code that can be used to identify or track users online. And an apocalypse is an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome of catastrophic scale. And this is exactly what we’re facing today – cookies, specifically third-party cookies – are facing, due to a number of factors, imminent extinction. And as for whether or not you should be worried… well…
Maybe. If you’re like this particular sales rep’s elderly aunt, maybe not. But if you’re business relies in any way on the larger marketing and advertising technology ecosystem to manage the targeting or frequency of ads, measure and attribute marketing spend, or execute on-site triggers or personalization, maybe yes. And to explain why, we’re going to use one of my favorite metaphors for explaining the role cookies play in the larger ecosystem…
Bees! But no birds - if you want that talk, go ask your parents. You see, bees play an incredibly important role in every part of the natural ecosystem. They don’t just make honey, which feeds not only humans but many other animals, they also pollinate billions of plants each year, including millions of agricultural crops. In fact, pollinators like bees play a key role in one out of every three bites of food we eat. Without them, many plants we rely on for food would die off.
Cookies play a similar role in the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem. They carry all sorts of data between different sources - brands, publishers, DMPs, SSPs, DSPs - making it an integral part of the process when it comes to identifying and valuing online audiences.
And also like bees, there are environmental changes that are dramatically impacting the ecosystem and causing cookies disappear.
One is the increase in consumer online privacy laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act – which are two, I think, incredibly important pieces of legislation that look to increase transparency for consumer into how their data is being collected, what data is being collected, and give them greater control over how that data is used. And that’s bad news for cookies, the use of which has evolved so wildly since their first inception and has, up until the past few year, gone mostly unregulated – as well as the brands and technologies that rely on them.
Because the fines for violating these policies are not cheap. For GDPR, it’s 20M euro or 4% of your global turnover – whichever is greater, and for the CCPA, it’s $7500 or $2500 per violation, depending on if it is deemed intentional or not. Which might not sound like a lot until you interpret ”per violation” as “per user.” So take you monthly site traffic, multiply it by $7500. Seems a bit more daunting now, huh?
And this has sped the the investment of the major website browsers to lock down how cookies are used, which can mean – in cases like Apple’s ITP in Safari – blocking cookies altogether.
Up until now, the market share of these “cookie-challenged” browsers across both mobile and desktop was only about 15-16%.
But with the recent changes that Google has made to it’s Chrome browser, that number jumps to 88-90% - and it is this commitment from Google to curb cookies that is the single event that I believe will push us over the edge.
But look, I’m not here to mourn the deprecation of the cookie. Cookies, again, much like bees, have not always been used for the ultimate good…
Like when they killed a young Macaulay Calkin in My Girl.
Or were used to torture Nicholas Cage in the Wicker Man.
Or gave Jerry Seinfeld an excuse to make “Bee Movie”
Cookies are ultimately a flawed technology for tracking and targeting audiences and have been ever since we stopped using just one device and one browser for everything we do online.
In fact, it is ultimately the failure of cookies to accurately identify a person that results in issues around poor targeting or frequency capping. That’s the irony. Is that many of the poor experiences we have as consumers are actually caused by cookies not working well.
But even knowing that, they are still all we have right now. The ”syncing” or matching of cookies is the most ubiquitous, if inefficient, means of connecting with your audience in a meaningful way both across your digital properties and across the rest of the internet. When that suddenly goes, it can have a major impact on your business.
Here’s just one example - to measure the effect of cookie blocking, Google’s ad team ran a test among 500 global publishers from May to August of this year and they found that digital publishers lose 52% of revenue on average when readers set their web browsers to block cookies, and news publishers saw an even steeper revenue loss of 62%.
Why? Because marketers will only pay more when they are able to confidently leverage data to reach target audiences effectively. Without cookies, you don’t have that data, and without data the value is lost.
Here’s another example that’s a bit more personal. So, at LiveIntent we just implemented a chatbot. And I love it, but it has a little personalization feature here that I thought was a great demonstration on a smaller scale for how cookie-challenged browser impact marketing strategies. Here on your left is me visiting our website on Google Chrome browser – where I happen to be logged-in, meaning no reliance on cookies for identification. See it says “Hey LiveIntent!” That’s nice. But then on your right, one minute later, same exact phone, I opened a Safari, not even in a private browser, and I get the default “hey there.” Which is not the end of the world, but if you’re a retailer relying on a trigger from a cookie to send an email and drive real sales and revenue, even a small dip or bump in match-rates can make a big difference.
Because as the saying goes “Personalization without the person is just ‘alization’ – and that’s not even a word.”
So this, of course, begs the question -
Am I doomed? Again. Maybe. But I’ve got some tips that, if you follow, should help to at least provision you well for even the worst of outcomes.
Survival Tip #1: Be Your Own Privacy Expert
So, there is a lot out there happening every day and we are in the midst of a sea-change. Keeping up with all the changes in policies and technologies is nearly a full time job. There are so many states right now that have some form of legislation in the works. Apple and Google are going to continue to make updates that will close loopholes that are currently being exploited, like using “fingerprinting” where details used to make a page display correctly in the browser – like the user’s language, operating system, fonts and IP address – are used to uniquely identify the user. Or the tying of of data to a non-cookie-based ID within web storage mechanisms like local storage.
That quote from the havard business review is from the year 2000 and is more true today than ever before. Of course, we may not all be able to hire a chief privacy officer, but having a person on your team that is dedicated to following this news, understanding it, and presenting changes and learnings even once a quarter would go a long way in ensuring you’re never caught unawares by either a new regulation, a change to a major platform, or the promises of a vendor that has a “workaround.”
This map is an amazing resource. The iapp – which is the international association of privacy professionals – provides this constantly up-to-date map.
Survival Tip #2: Understand How Your Customers Value Their Data
So, we all like to think that what everyone really wants from us, as marketers, is to be understood and provided an experience that speaks to them as an individual. And in some cases, consumers seem willing to share personal data in exchange for relevance – like with gender or race. But overall, only 26% of consumers would be willing to share personal data in exchange for an improved customer experience. You know what they would exchange data for? Straight up cash. 100%.
But every audience is going to be different, so you need to know what you audience values most, then find a way to provide it to them when asking for their data – be it great content, great deals, or just something they honestly can’t get anywhere else. Sharing data should be a permission-based, willful, cognizant choice. Sharing your data is taking a risk. The value you provide should be worth that risk.
If you want to have data for personalization, you need to personalize what is being offered in exchange for that data.
Survival Tip #3: Invest in Collecting and Leveraging 1st-Party Data
So here’s a funny dichotomy. 85% of US brand marketers say that increasing their use of first-party data is a high or critical priority.
And yet more than 50% feels that they aren’t even reaching 61% of it’s potential. The brands that survive are going to be the ones that prioritize and dedicate resources to collecting, understanding, and leveraging their first-party data to it’s full extent.
And you’re seeing that trend now. Large retail firms are starting to buy advertising and marketing technology companies, or build their own. The Washington Post build it’s own ad network for advertisers called Zeus Prime. It is intended to offer an alternative to Google and Facebook for publishers and advertisers. You see other companies looking to combine forces or partner to make a difference. But even if you can’t do that, there is one very simple thing you can do…
And that’s start acquiring email addresses. There is a reason that 89% of marketers surveyed said a customer’s email address was valuable or extremely valuable to them. It is a persistent, long-lived ID that is tied to a single individual and is involved in nearly every online transaction you make – whether it’s logging into a social network, checking out at an ecommerce site, or subscribing to some content. The one unifying identifier is the email address. Email has also already been through the privacy wringer a few times with CAN-SPAM laws, making it a safe and compliant environment in which consumer prefer to engage with brands.
So, to just give a quick recap:
Survival Tip #1: Be Your Own Data Privacy Expert
Regulations and technology move pretty quickly. You want to make sure you know exactly what’s coming.
Survival Tip #2: Understand How Your Customers Value Their Data
Consumers, in general, are more aware than ever of how their data is being collected and used. To ask for that permission, you have to be providing them with something of even greater value to them.
Survival Tip #3: Invest in Collecting and Leveraging 1st-Party Data
The brands that survive are going to be the ones that best understand the data they have on-hand and how to use it. Third part data is no longer viable. Make sure you’re using your data wherever and whenever you can. It is one of the few true advantages you have.
And that’s it. Thank you all for sharing this time with me today. I hope you found it useful.