It’s no secret: the digital marketing world is fast approaching judgment day.
Soon, third-party cookies will no longer be allowed to track individuals across the web, harvesting reams of information to help deliver targeted ads. Already, many browsers are blocking them as tech companies rush to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. But a true reckoning is coming in 2024, when the world’s most popular browser, which already delayed a cookie ban once, restricts them for good.
“Companies need to overhaul their advertising strategies to prepare for a dramatically different landscape,” states an April 2022 industry report. “The game is about to change.”
Most marketing executives knew the transition was coming for years, yet many companies still have no strategy to adapt—and will almost certainly get caught flat-footed when the shift happens. In short, there’s a harsh reality check coming for digital marketers and companies that still rely on cookies to identify, understand, and reach customers.
“The demise of third-party cookies is top of mind for most organizations, but the urgency isn’t felt in the way that it needs to be,” says Kristina Prokop, general manager at Dun & Bradstreet, which provides commercial data, analytics, and insights for businesses. “On the one hand, the delay was the best thing that could have happened for many of these companies. On the other hand, it was an excuse to put it on the back burner yet again.”
There is good news, however. Third-party cookies are not the seamless solution for understanding customers that they were made out to be. In fact, the coming changes to the digital marketing landscape will enable companies to build new and more nuanced approaches to better understand audiences as individuals. With the clock ticking, however, the question becomes which companies will get a leg up on the competition—and which will be left behind.
“This is one of those things that if you don’t start planning and testing now, your customer data can become useless in three quarters of a year,” says Prokop. “That can really do damage to a business and its customer pipelines, its customer interactions, and its customer engagement.”
A Shifting Landscape Opens Possibilities
Cookie technology began in the mid-1990s with Internet Explorer 2, the first browser to support the technology. Since then, third-party cookies have become the bedrock of a multibillion-dollar digital advertising and marketing industry, tracking consumers across the web to serve them personalized ads.
Today, however, privacy protection is shaping the evolution of the online world, and that has led to the move away from cookies, perhaps the most dramatic change the digital marketing world has experienced.
“It’s like making the switch from the distribution of gasoline for cars to the distribution of electricity,” says Prokop. “This isn’t something you can do overnight. It’s about changing the way an entire infrastructure works.”
For business leaders, whether in marketing, sales, or data management, this shift will require a reassessment of strategies. According to a 2021 survey of senior marketers in the United States, 51 percent of respondents said that cookies are still “very important” for their marketing approach and provide a majority of the data their company uses. Just 10 percent said that cookies are “not important.”
With figures like this, there’s no doubt the transition will have a negative impact on many companies—particularly businesses, like B2B enterprises, that are not consumer-focused brands. But there are opportunities too.
“It’s really going to be a combination of a lot of different strategies that compensate for the loss of the third-party cookie,” says Prokop. “The first part of the challenge is creating a first-party data asset that’s not primarily dependent on third-party cookies. The second is having external data sources that can be used to augment first party-data. Then the challenge becomes, ‘How do I actually take that data and make it actionable?’”
Getting First-Party Data in Order
In the cookieless future, most companies’ primary source of digital info about their customers will be first-party data, collected through direct interactions with their websites and apps, as well as durable identifiers like hashed email addresses and universal IDs. This data will include info such as browsing behavior, content consumption, locations, device, and time of day, and it can be a gold mine for companies, provided it’s not sitting in silos where it can’t be utilized in conjunction with other relevant data.
“The evolution we’re moving toward is a world that’s focused on direct interaction with consumers,” says Prokop. “This will involve a cleaner, more precise data set, and it will be much smaller.”
If a business doesn’t have centralized customer data—or isn’t using an effective centralized platform—it will lose out on utilizing it. Businesses must be able to connect all that data internally or they’ll lose insight and potential growth that could be harnessed from a first-party asset.
“First and foremost, it’s about unifying all the data in one place so that it can be analyzed,” Prokop says. “Figure out what you have in terms of first-party data—whether that’s hashed emails, universal IDs, or panel-based data sets—and how you're going to manage it. Then assess what your gaps are and where you need more insight. This way, the data can be used in its entirety to learn about your customers, build segments of who you want to reach, and figure out how to communicate with them.”
As third-party cookies disappear, it may actually be easier to connect with customers. In the new environment, data collection will be viewed as a value exchange in which both parties stand to gain. But this will only happen if collection is transparent and consumers trust that their data will be used ethically and stored securely. As a result, brands that are open about these issues—and the benefits shared data provides in return—can expect to have more customers opt in and, as a result, will gain access to better first-party data to leverage.
“The more trust the consumer or B2B business professional has with the brand they’re interacting with, the better it is for both parties,” says Prokop.
Augmenting First-Party Data with Partners
While first-party data is a great starting point for marketing and sales efforts in the post-cookie era, it does have limitations. In most cases, the data sets will be small—not enough to enable state-of-the-art targeting of new customers.
“That’s where working with trusted partners’ data to augment first-party data becomes very important,” says Prokop. “The challenge is: How do you take the knowledge you have about your customers, which is based on direct interactions, and extrapolate that to make decisions about reaching people you don’t know?”
Partnering with experts can help businesses aggregate data—and scale. In 2020, for example, Rockwell Automation, a smart manufacturing and digital transformation company, was looking to better utilize its existing market data and reach new customers. Essentially, the company wanted to build a customer data platform (CDP), a centralized hub for collecting in-depth customer data, to create a robust profile of the ideal customer and then reach them through personalized marketing across channels.
Partnering with Dun & Bradstreet, Rockwell began to use Rev.Up ABX, a CDP that helps companies grow revenue with unified data, targeted audiences, and personalized activations across channels. First, Rockwell Automation sifted through its existing data to find the most useful material. Then it merged insights from that data with D&B’s own suggested contacts in the platform. Finally, Rockwell Automation used the platform to compare audience engagement—how and where they were interacting—and to optimize programs in an easy-to-use dashboard to reach new customers. In less than six weeks, the company created a fully integrated system that reduced segmentation work that previously had taken weeks to complete into a simple task accomplished in seconds.
“Unified data plus audience visualization drove a 20 to 50 percent increase in average segment size,” said Gudrun Wetak, ODM/ABM/ABX marketing manager at Rockwell Automation. “Rev.Up offered the most complete solution, supported the locations-based identification we needed, and seamlessly integrated. This is a great tool.”
Keep Innovating as the Cookie Crumbles
Looking ahead, the most important thing for companies to do is to begin making changes now—and realize potential that may be overlooked. Traditionally, for example, business-to-business marketing has been thought of as corporate communication. Today, however, the distinction between business customers and purchasing customers is becoming increasingly unclear.
“Our business lives have changed drastically over the past three years,” Prokop says. “And what we're finding is this line between us as business professionals and as humans is starting to blur. We’re doing so much of our purchasing and research online, and not through the traditional channels we used to.”
As a result, partnering with platforms to sharpen and augment existing data sets can help companies better understand their customers as people—and connect with them more deeply going forward.
“This becomes very important in B2B marketing,” Prokop says. “We believe the future hinges on that connection from businesses to humans, and not just business to business professionals.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Dun & Bradstreet.
