The Future of Ad-targeting without third-party cookies

Cookie yes or cookieless? Is there a post-cookie-world? Well… yes, it does exist! The biggest companies and the most used browsers are going through this new direction and they are gradually moving towards a new way of managing online advertising and campaigns. From a deterministic approach to a probabilistic one

Have you already seen this webinar? Are you aware of cookies’ problems on different browsers? Get a solution!

Experts from large companies, such as Deloitte, Group M and ENI have already found an innovative way to use this technological cookieless model for their creative strategies.

The advertising world is updating and the cookieless model is developing and it is being used in many different use-cases.

In our “Cookieless Advertising Future” webinar, we wanted to talk about the cookie limitations and the approach to this new technological method, with a talk between Alberto Nasciuti and Andrea Zanotti, KPI6 CEO and CMO, and Matteo Ferrando and Chiara Brunelli, GroupM Senior Stack Consultant and Biddable Specialist.

The development over time of the cookie model has led to highlight its main lacks.

Cookies are an important feature for all digital advertising industry, but they have limitations that should not be underestimated. That’s why two very important search browsers (Mozilla and Safari) decided to remove third-party cookies and a third one (Chrome) to remove them by the end of 2021.

Above all, why did all these important companies decide to use and go for a cookieless model? Because of the growing importance of privacy and compliance in the advertising world, the phasing-out and the opportunity to overcome the limitations of the cookie model.

Here we have an explication of the features of the ID-based cookie model that, time by time, have turned into its failures.

Cookies refer only to the single person/user who has completed an action on the web-site, making the campaign more personalized but less effective,  not reaching a large audience.

After a while, the cookie can be deleted or no longer be punctual, it can no longer be updated.

The cookie model presents a fragmented model that slows down and creates a limit in advertising operations. In the creation of an audience, multiple tools are used to have a single solution.

With the Cookieless model, we are watching the switch from an id-based to a profiling-based model, from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one.

It’s not talking about individual people, but about “buyer personas”. They are models that help to target, in order to have the right person at the right time, no longer in a deterministic but in a probabilistic way.

The campaign may lose effectiveness, but it exposes to a wider audience, which (in a probabilistic way) can be an excellent target.

Customers, fans, users change over time, as well as their tastes and interests. With the cookieless model, it is possible to update the intercepted users day by day, monitoring their changes.

Within the same platform, it’s possible to work and switch between the various phases, from the initial listening phase to the final audience activation phase.

It is obvious that this new way of seeing advertising, together with the new cookieless technologies, has changed the way of targeting.

In the listening phase, the audience that matches the company desiderata will not only be a person who talks about its products, but will also be a user who talks about its competitors.

Then, it is possible to define your own buyer personas but also the competitors’ ones: an excellent target for a new market share!

Next, the personas classification (removing and skimming all the “noisy information”), the segmentation and the final profiling phases follow a different procedure, obtaining all the information needed. In this way, it’s possible to have a 360 ° view of the audience, useful and very valid also for the contents creativity of the adv.

And this is another very important point: creativity. Not only the definition of target lives on cookies, but also the less analytical part, such as the strategic-creative one, can draw from this set of information.

This is the question of Matteo Ferrando, Senior Stack Consultant of GroupM, a leading global investment company in the media sector.

Until now, the largest media centers, such as GroupM, have concentrated much of their work and methods on cookies, particularly in the Biddable Team, in planning activities such as Facebook, Google and Amazon campaigns.

Trying to create a link, a virtual bridge, between the typically MarTech techniques  to the Adv world, Matteo Ferrando and Chiara Brunelli, Head of Biddable & Ecommerce lead of GroupM, asked themselves:

Starting to test! Taking steps forward, together with the customer brief, making the customers themselves challenges, trying to find new tools that become a / b test, which then become campaigns.

This new technological model helps in creating campaigns on social networks and to improve the audience (actions that in the old model, required data from cookies).

Through the cookieless model technology, it is possible to have all the socio-demographic data of the users (which are usually given by the customer) and their own interests.

When all this information are collected, the audiences are analyzed and constructed, to be then uploaded to the Business Manager to start the Facebook campaigns.

These audiences are also important in the strategic and creative phase to define more correct creativity for each target, define the main elements of the asset and insert them into the creativity in order to give the right message and tone of voice to tell the brand and the campaigns.

Cookieless technology allows bringing benefits to the work of both the customer and the media center. It is possible to see the pre-launch data of the campaign and to work on data-driven creativity that makes easier the work and performance of all people.

The campaign monitoring phase also benefits from this, understanding how to optimize the budget, hit the right target, be aware of changes in the opinion of the target, thus going to decline the funnel up to the conversion part.

To be effective, each method and model must have the correct technological application. Currently, there are many solutions available on the market, much like the scenery itself.

In KPI6 we combine both: we follow the method and put its application into practice.

We like cookies so much, we eat them of all kinds: chocolate, with butter, vegan.

But we’ve learned to get them out of our diet!

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Experts from large companies, such as Deloitte, Group M and ENI have already found an innovative way to use this technological cookieless model for their creative strategies.