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Future of Media Cookieless ID-less

3 key questions brands need to ask when running a mobile advertising strategy

Ogury

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April 27, 2022 | 6 min read

The death of the cookie is just around the corner

But advertising will never die as long as commerce lives. At the cutting edge as always, mobile advertisers need to find alternative ways of delivering relevant ads to specific audiences. But how?

Brands are moving away from personalized ads. Research from analyst firm Gartner found that four out of five digital advertisers will cease all personalization by 2025 - moving on decisively from intrusive solutions based on personal data.

As we edge nearer to an ID-less and cookie-less world, we still need to target relevant ads to interested customers. But regardless of whether the solution is ID-less or ID-based, advertisers should care about one thing and one thing alone: understanding their audiences’ interests.

Personification seems to be the right answer to this question. It is defined by Gartner as “the delivery of relevant digital experiences to individuals based on their inferred membership in a defined customer segment, rather than their personal identity.” By relying on audience interest data used to qualify impressions, rather than personal data to qualify users, it offers the best way to understand the interests of key audiences whilst respecting user privacy. Advertisers can continue to reach the right consumers with relevant ads for products and services that they either like today or will grow to love over time.

However, before leaping into that brand new mobile advertising campaign, there are three fundamental questions advertisers must ask themselves, if they want to get personification right.

1) Do we really know our audience’s interests?

With personal user data soon no longer available, brands need to hone in on what is truly useful: ‘Do I actually understand the interests of my key audience?’. It may sound basic, but, for some, it is a revelation.

Advances in the data privacy legislation protecting consumers, such as the EU’s GDPR, and new privacy technology, like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), mean advertisers have a harder time pinpointing individuals within their audiences. But they can still get to their customers, if they choose the right solutions.

Unfortunately, solutions on the market are still not addressing the industry's problems. Some vendors will hang onto using fragmented personal data but this only yields information about activity within their own ad network. Semantic and contextual targeting are at the heart of many new solutions, but these lack audience intelligence.

Neither of these solutions deliver sufficient knowledge of the audience's interests and often don't reach the right consumers. Clearly, new approaches are needed.

2) Why are we still using video completion rate as a main KPI?

The ad industry suffers from another key problem - nostalgia. While changes in the industry around data privacy shifted how ads are delivered, the way advertisers measure success has not evolved. Again this involves a basic question: “How can I be sure my video ads are truly being seen?”.

Video Completion Rate (VCR) is the most common metric used today to measure video ad campaigns performance. However, it also leads to what some call ‘the VCR trap’. This arises when videos keep playing off-screen after hitting the viewability standard, making advertisers believe they have achieved a high VCR. And what is the point of measuring VCR for videos that are partially in-view or even playing off-screen? High VCR without full visibility is false, as brand messages will not be conveyed accurately, let alone remembered.

No other ad format traps buyers like this. Marketers wouldn’t buy TV ads with only half of the video playing on screen, so why are they allowing digital video ads to be served in such a way?

The basic metrics of campaign success must change for advertisers. To get an accurate picture of their video ad performance, a better indicator is the Fully On-Screen Rate for 50% duration, measuring impressions only when 100% of pixels are in-view for at least half of the video ad.

3) Is our strategy future-proof?

Whether the solution uses identifiers or not, digital advertisers will have to realign their methods to satisfy existing customers and acquire new ones. It’s time to focus on solutions that accurately deliver performance whilst also protecting consumer privacy. And this demands a new form of technology.

This is exactly where personification and Personified Advertising come into play, using audience interest data to qualify impressions, instead of personal data to qualify users. This audience interest data has been analyzed for several years, monitoring users’ mobile journey across a large variety of apps and websites. This data is constantly validated through survey data to ensure advertisers have an up-to-date understanding of their audiences behavior.

A more personable future

The future of digital advertising relies on targeting based on personification, and in many ways, it spawns deeper analysis. Examples of the key insights this method can yield are things like “the number one interest of gym enthusiasts is how to build their careers”, or “Rolling Stones magazine readers have a higher affinity to video-on-demand services than the rest of the population”. Of the plethora of solutions out there, only a few can bring these essential insights back. Those technologies can deliver in-depth insights and produce stronger results.

Personified Advertising’s powerful use of ID-less and cookie-less targeting outperforms any alternative solution on the market, and gives actionable insights while still respecting privacy. It is the sustainable and future-proof solution marketers have been looking for, and soon it will become the norm.

By Ossie Bayram, UK Country Director, Ogury

Future of Media Cookieless ID-less

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