The end of cookies opens up a new dawn of outcomes driven marketing

The future for marketers in a post third-party cookie world is still rather unknown - many are seeking new ways to best maintain and grow performance in these uncharted waters. Embracing the demise of the cookie by shifting to a privacy centric approach has left marketers scrambling to figure out how to drive optimal outcomes to properly navigate this new market shift. All the while following the age old marketing equation; the right person + right message + the right content. 

The marketing industry has invested enormous amounts of time and money to achieve this marketing equation, and the disappearance of the humble cookie somewhat puts a spanner in the works, due to its previous role in playing the primary tactic for reaching the right person with a personalised message. As marketers enter the post third-party cookie world they are forced to reevaluate what worked and what has not by shifting their focus back on to outcome. 

In the marketing world, we have always believed digital advertising's greatest advantage was endless data, which alone would drive tremendous ROI. However, the reality according to LinkedIn is that only 37% of digital marketers describe themselves as “very confident” in their digital ROI metrics, and 68% of brands have misattributed ROI. 

The past decade has proven marketers relied heavily on the cookie, believing tracking users was the panacea to driving outcomes. However, this only provides one third of the classic marketing equation, with marketers allocating the vast majority of their focus around the end consumer. 
 

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Marketers main focus, understandably, was finding the right audience, which inadvertently reduced the value of the creative and the contextual environment, driving outcomes to virtually zero. The right message became all about retargeting, and the invasive smart ads that followed - albeit it effective to some measure - devalued the creativity necessary to compel consumers the way other ads do. As a result, the right contextual environment resulted in shifting huge media investments into the social walled gardens where the right context was defined by the platform. Herein lies the first lesson for marketers; relying too heavily on any one data point is not sustainable. 

For advertisers, having the ability to target specific consumer audiences meant they could control the narrative. The cookie was a scalable, deterministic data point that the ad tech world embraced as the connective tissue to link digital marketing platforms. In other words, the entire programmatic technology stack was virtually architected around the cookie. The second lesson reveals that the ecosystem must have a common deterministic data point that ties all other data together to function cohesively. 
 

The new marketing formula

There are three core principles that will help rebuild the marketing ecosystem: 

1. Driving outcomes is the objective 
2. Scalable deterministic data points that can interconnect systems is required
3. Balance in the marketing formula across people, content and creative is critical

Contextual is often thought of as targeting keywords on a page, but this is just a slither of what advanced solutions offer today. As contextual moves to the forefront we must embrace the URL as the only deterministic data point left on virtually every impression - the URL is ubiquitous, here to stay, fully transparent, and highly accessible. 
 

Key takeaways: How to drive real marketing outcomes

1. The marketing formula never changes but it does rebalance, requiring marketers to retool their digital stack and align strategies with the post-cookie environment
2. The URL will replace the cookie ID as the foundational link between data since it is the only deterministic data point available on every impression - becoming the foundational glue for driving ROI by enabling analytics, optimisation and other core functions of digital advertising
3. Contextual advancements replace audience profiles at scale by identifying in the moment marketing opportunities to align the consumer receptivity with the brand message through the analysis of a multitude of data signals connected by the URL

It is highly unlikely the industry will ever again have a standard audience identifier on every impression that can act as the deterministic data point that can easily be accessed and optimised. On the bright side, the URL can and will be the driving force behind how outcomes are ultimately tied to context, audience, creative and other data in a privacy friendly, regulatory compliant way.