Given the continued, yet ever-changing, promise that cookies will ultimately disappear, marketers are still feeling quite unprepared to effectively and efficiently reach their audiences at scale. With the seemingly overwhelming consensus that marketers don’t yet have the data needed to optimize media budgets, the move to alternative non-third-party identifiers is an absolute necessity to protect performance in the near term and prepare a more impactful audience strategy in the longer term.
While this might be daunting for brands, modern marketers have the opportunity to redefine their approach — and not just compete, but to notably set themselves apart from their competitors. With the increasing adoption of AI and other emerging solutions, the landscape and opportunities have changed dramatically. We are at a critical point in this evolution. Decisions made today will empower brands to pivot quickly from one strategy to another based on real-time findings.
Post-cookie solutions: Act proactively to address 2024 trends
Gathering privacy-safe data sets will be essential for any advertiser who wishes to stay relevant in a post-cookie world. It appears most marketers have some cookie-less identifier solution in place. But the ever-increasing set of solutions — like cohort-based targeting, universal IDs, seller-defined audiences and data clean rooms — “designed” to assist marketers has driven considerable confusion and angst for advertisers.
Brands need to select a set of solutions based on their unique audience needs. Each approach offers potential pathways forward, but also presents challenges:
- Cohort-based solutions, defined groups based on shared traits and behaviors, enable precise targeting but may introduce bias
- Universal IDs, a single identifier assigned to each user, allow cross-site tracking yet require universal adoption and may face scale challenges
- Seller-defined audiences, which allow publishers to create custom segments, leverage interests and demographics, but may overlook valuable customers
- Data clean rooms, a secure environment to collect and analyze customer data from various sources while maintaining privacy and enforcing security controls, is a necessity for marketers, but requires investment and coordination
The 2024 audience paradigm
Regardless of what approaches a brand chooses, key considerations must be at the forefront of how programs are managed in 2024:
- AI powers audiences + drives incremental teams: AI certainly had many moments in 2023 and these will only accelerate throughout 2024. Brands and agencies will notably invest in the development of specialty teams to lead adoption and innovation. This coupled with all that was learned in the last year, will drive modern marketers to further investigate the use of AI to more comprehensively analyze, consider and shape targeting strategies in the near term. And ultimately, the clever adoption of AI will better prepare marketers to deliver effective targeting that converts in a post-cookie world.
- Heightened data security accelerates: It feels like new (and serious) data breaches are occurring more regularly. At the same time, individual states continue to enact new privacy legislation that dramatically alters what consumer data can be collected. As a result, brands will increasingly require that agencies implement leading security practices to support the protection of sensitive information. In today’s cyber-aware landscape, verbal declarations of best practices will no longer suffice. Intelligent marketers will demand certifications that provide the confidence and assurance that they are committed to the highest standards for cybersecurity and data protection.
- Transparent measurement must become even more transparent: The growing importance of performance tracking will propel brands to demand full transparency at a time when marketers face building programs without the detailed data sets and insights that have formed the backbone of their audience strategies. With new and disparate data sources, the intelligent and methodical use of attribution, incrementality and testing will become even more crucial for successful audience-led activations.
- Reimagine traditional fundamentals to impact digital performance: In the wake of major shifts in audience targeting, we can learn from decades of direct marketing. These embedded principles provide a roadmap to better performance in the digital marketing ecosystem. Marketers can leverage these well-built, known target audiences to help future-proof a robust multichannel strategy.
- Emerging strategies evolve, always: Marketers and agencies will continue to develop and experiment with newer strategies across channels and technologies. There will never be a single solution, so it’s imperative for brands to be open and explore what might work — while also focusing on their own first-party data strategy.
In the midst of uncertainty, it is clear that marketers must lean into their audience strategies in a meaningful way — or risk being out-marketed and ultimately losing customers to competitors. If history tells us anything, success will be realized through a combination of art and science.
Download Amsive’s Audience Science report, The Future of Audience Solutions: Privacy-First Marketing in the Post-Cookie Era to inform your 2024 planning and activations.
About Amsive
Amsive is a data-led performance marketing agency that enhances ROI through innovative customer acquisition, engagement, and communications solutions.
A full-service partner with both digital and direct-native expertise, Amsive designs audience, creative, and channel strategies that amplify growth using in-house campaign and production capabilities for seamless execution.
At the core of Amsive’s success is Audience Science, our unique approach to audience building and analysis, channel activation, testing, and measurement. We navigate today’s marketing complexity to develop optimal audiences and surpass performance objectives, always focusing on your next best customer. To learn more, visit Amsive.com.
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