Bridging the cookie-less gap: what’s ahead for digital advertising

The future of advertising will be cookie-less by the end of 2023, impacting our entire digital ecosystem. Which functions within organizations should be preparing? How can those who are unprepared get up to speed more quickly? How important is 1st party data and artificial intelligence to filling the gaps left by 3rd party cookies? We caught up with Kevin Mannion, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Advertiser Perceptions to answer these questions and more about the possibilities that lay ahead.

Transcript:
The truth of the matter is third-party cookies are going away and you're not going to be able to follow people around the web the way that you used to. Most advertisers and publishers, while they're absolutely convinced that we're going to get to a better place, they're seeing a fallout, for them, in performance advertising. There's some things that are pretty clear, I think. One is a much greater need for marketers to harness first party data, that they have. They're not able to harness it fully right now, because it's all over the organization and it's in the CRM, it's in marketing. So the Nirvana really, ultimately, always has been how to target, connect with, measure success, build relationships with customers and prospects at each step of the customer journey. That's what first party data offers. So there are a lot of solutions that are being developed for that. Right now it appears to us that your largest companies and your largest advertisers are the most advanced, because they're thinking about this. It's not just the marketer that has to be involved, It's the whole C-suite. It's the CEO, the CMO, the CIO, CPO, the Chief Procurement Officer. They all have to be involved in this and they are getting involved. So it's not just a marketing and an advertising thing, it's really kind of the vitality of the company future, So to speak. None of the solutions that are being talked about, harnessing first party data, being able to safeguard pseudo-anonymous, third party data, none of the solutions really will work unless you have effective privacy insured, AI. It's absolutely going to be critical. You can't stitch this together without it. I think that we're going to be seeing some pretty exciting things develop with the big players being solution providers, but also those that are nimble and providing point solutions to be able to safeguard and effectively develop targeting and measurement capabilities. So we'll probably seeing a lot of new players, between now and then, who are much more visible in the marketplace than they are right now.