The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Brand Purpose Brand Strategy Webinar

Balancing creative & data in equal measure for a cookieless future

Author

By Jenni Baker, Senior Editor

May 2, 2023 | 6 min read

Sponsored by:

What's this?

Sponsored content is created for and in partnership with an advertiser and produced by the Drum Studios team.

Find out more

First-party data, contextual targeting, collaboration, experimentation and creativity are essential ingredients in the future-proof cookieless recipe, say experts from StackAdapt and Earnest.

The Drum x StackAdapt Upcoming Webinar

The Drum x StackAdapt Upcoming Webinar

Preparing for the cookieless future is no doubt a top priority for marketers to sort in 2023, despite being three years in the making. Marketers would be forgiven for not acting faster, being lured into a false sense of security with doomsday scenarios and continued delays. But the fear of the unknown isn’t enough to stop working to future-proof digital marketing.

With cookies crumbling, there’s space for a new snack on the shelf in the digital pantry. Advertisers and agencies have been scrambling, while adtech partners have been working at full steam to offer alternative cookieless targeting tactics to fill the void, but with a saturation of alternative solutions coming out - from cohort targeting to clean data rooms to contextual targeting options - it can be difficult for marketers to truly embrace change.

But as three-in-four advertisers make preparation for the cookieless future an important or critical priority, The Drum sat down with Raina Roberts, sales director at StackAdapt and James Deagan, digital strategist at Earnest, to crunch the conversation on third-party cookies and explore the real, tangible potential of cookieless privacy-preserving solutions. You can catch up on the full session here.

From experimentation to collaboration to first-party data and contextual targeting, the experts explore some of the top considerations for marketers as they look to future-proof their digital advertising recipes.

“There’s lots of new solutions out there and lots of players saying they have the solution that will work,” says Roberts. “But especially when it comes to tech, it’s important to continuously test the solutions you’ll be using from the different vendors you’re working with to understand how the machine learning algorithms are working for you.”

But the cookie story is about more than just data and technology, says Deagan, who urges brands to be braver with their creatives when activating campaigns.

“It requires a rethink about how we approach the challenge of reaching the right audience and how to start getting that message across,” he says. “The first thing for me is stepping back to some of the fundamentals of marketing and really thinking about how we are delivering the brand message that we need and delivering real value through the advertising? It’s a real opportunity for the best creative to really shine through.

“With above the line channels like OOH and TV, you’ve got to have cutting edge, really effective creative to stand out, and perhaps digital’s been forgotten a little bit about. But creative is the last legal unfair competitive advantage that you can have over other brands - so really making sure that you are standing out from the crowd and making an impact, is what’s really going to drive effectiveness in a cookieless world.”

He believes that the shift to a cookieless future is an opportunity for brands to really break the mold and be braver when it comes to thinking about how they activate a campaign instead of brands “floating into the sea of sameness”, leading Roberts to explore what she sees as two of the biggest opportunities that follow: a first-party data strategy and contextual advertising to be able to deliver that to the audience.

“It’s kind of contradictory because when we talk about data in general, we’re always talking about the cookieless future and contextual and privacy first,” she says. “We’re being pushed towards this privacy-first world but at the same time demand for personalization is still here. Getting on top of your first-party data strategy is key but when you might not have it or ways to target with that data, you can turn to contextual solutions as well to expand your reach.”

Click here to watch the full discussion in ‘The great digital bake off: when cookies are no more, what next for programmatic?’

Suggested newsletters for you

Daily Briefing

Daily

Catch up on the most important stories of the day, curated by our editorial team.

Ads of the Week

Wednesday

See the best ads of the last week - all in one place.

The Drum Insider

Once a month

Learn how to pitch to our editors and get published on The Drum.

Brand Purpose Brand Strategy Webinar

Content created with:

StackAdapt

StackAdapt is a multi-channel programmatic advertising platform used by the most exceptional digital marketers. This state-of-the-art platform is where some of the...

Find out more

More from Brand Purpose

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +