‘In a Cookieless World, it is important to enrich first-party data with DMP & Data Signals’ – Siddharth Dabhade, Managing Director, MIQ

Siddharth Dabhade is the Managing Director at MIQ. His expertise lies in team building, customer success, revenue growth and P&L management. In his current role, Siddharth looks after India and SAARC (South Asia) countries’ business for MiQ.

AR – The ‘cookieless movement’ has been on the cards for the last few years. In your opinion, what do you think were the factors responsible for this, alongside the immense focus on data privacy?

Siddharth Dabhade –

With big companies knowing a lot about a consumer by just dropping cookie on the browser which is the gateway to Internet, created data privacy concerns
Excessive retargeting and chasing consumers also led to sub-optimal experience
Examples of political influences and influencing elections
Incidents of data breaches and misuse did not help the overall situation

AR – How has the scraping of cookies changed the programmatic world?

Walled gardens – where consumers “opt-in” will see growth due to two factors

Tech Giants will benefit because consumers are opted into them by design. There is no data loss.
What was looking like an open-web, will have new solutions basis the shared id. Essentially shared id is to put a bubble around a big area of the openweb and to make tracking and targeting possible within that bubble. This will help protect and anonymize individual consumer data.

The first party has become very critical now. In fact the biggest things Brand need to be doing now is to strengthen their first party data. Cleanroom technology can help them enrich their first party data and it has great potential to help Brands supercharge their campaigns.

AR – What are the most crucial challenges you expect to witness or are currently witnessing in the cookieless environment?

Cookieless is scheduled to happen on Chrome in 2022. So it is not the situation currently that cookies are not there already.

India will also have the advantage of a lot of targeting happening with device ids (mobile first economy) which will remain.

AR – As a programmatic marketer, how are you overcoming the said challenges?

Anybody who owns their own cookie space should already be adapting to the change in Chrome by labelling cookies, but there are a few ways you can plan ahead for the ultimate removal of third party cookies altogether.

Get creative with cookieless channels. Contextual targeting is the obvious low-hanging fruit. But digital out of home, mobile, connected TV, and audio are all growing steadily to become the biggest channels for programmatic investment – and they also all happen to be cookieless. Our clients are already catching on – we’ve seen advanced contextual buying grow as a proportion of activation compared to audience buying in the last 12 months, and mobile has also grown considerably compared to display.
Focus on eye-catching creative and messaging that users want to engage with. If your message is compelling enough, your CPA will fall and you’ll have less need for niche targeting. That’s why we’ve seen chatbot creative formats take off in many of our global markets. Using an engaging, interactive chatbot allows consumers to self-identify as being interested in a product.
Build out your first party data. You have a legitimate relationship with consumers surfing your site and, if you continue to build on this data, you can unlock effective audience targeting by building out a cross-device identity graph. If you haven’t thought about the data you have access to and how you can harness it, now is the time to do so. At MiQ we help clients every day with data reviews to highlight opportunities to build better value for their business using their pre-existing data assets.
Get ahead of the curve. Supply-side partners are already hard at work planning to find other ways to monetize their user-base when the cookie finally crumbles. We’re already seeing them looking to get ahead by capturing data such as email addresses in return for access to online content. The RTB auction process is set to undergo a facelift to ensure these data signals can be passed along for activation, so identity resolution partners such as Liveramp will play a big part in the future of targeting.
Understand the clean room opportunity. ADH and other clean rooms present a unique opportunity to access log level user data in a privacy first environment. We’re working to replicate many of our capabilities such as predictive modelling, custom audience activation and incrementality measurement within ADH to help our clients differentiate and get the most out of their investments in Google Marketing Platform.

AR – Given the demise of third-party cookies, how can organizations leverage first-party data effectively?

Invest in building a good first party data. For example – many FMCG companies are embarking on D2C strategy. It is an excellent way to engage with consumers directly and build out first party data.
Use campaigns data and enrich it with the DMP / data lake. Understand the profile of the consumers who are engaging more and build out their data.
Build a customer data platform by combining data from various sources – web, app, CRM and other consumer touch points.

It is important to enrich the first-party data with DMP and data signals. By enrichment and segmentation, you can drive the right marketing strategies to retain and grow your consumer base.

First-party data enrichment can also help you create look-alike of your most valuable customers and drive marketing to acquire them to scale.

AR – What are the alternative strategies that the programmatic industry is establishing to target relevant audiences to survive in the cookieless world?

Authenticated data – also called logged-in, identified, addressable, and people-based data – is one of the most important data sources that will replace third-party cookies.

It’s generated when users log-in to a publisher site using their email address, phone number or some other highly personal identifier. And that means it’s far more powerful than a cookie – if you can see a customer email address, you can tie it directly to your first-party data and know with a high degree of certainty whether they’re likely to be someone it’s worth showing an ad to. It’s more persistent too – we change our email addresses pretty rarely, unlike cookies which are regularly erased from browsers. Its potential is exciting. We’ve run some test campaigns with LiveRamp, a leader in the authenticated ID space, and the results have been very encouraging. In a campaign using authenticated IDs, we were able to deliver 67% higher reach, with a 9% reduction in CPM, compared to a cookies-only campaign.

Anonymous data – which you may also see described as cohort data or aggregated data – is all the data at our disposal where no single user is ever identified. Instead, we make inferences on how they’ll behave based on things like where they live, what sites they browse, what apps they use and so on, and then sort them into groups for targeting. This type of data combines old-school predigital things like census data with some of the most technologically advanced solutions for data gathering out there – things like edge-computing where a user’s behavior is analyzed so it can be placed into segments on the ‘edge’ of their personal device (rather than in the cloud). An unidentifiable segment signal is then sent so advertisers can build and target an addressable audience with similar activity without ever having access to any personal data. Anonymous data has far greater scale than authenticated data, but its mirror-image drawback is that it (traditionally, at least) lacks the precision of really sticky identifiers, relying instead on broad assumptions about user behavior. But the good news is that the solutions for extracting valuable insights from anonymous data are getting ever more sophisticated. And the good news is, this isn’t new – it’s already happening. To give you a sense of it, 72% of the conversions from our top 10 direct response advertisers are based on advanced contextual (ie anonymous) strategies, rather than cookies.

Increasingly, data is going to sit in clean rooms, super-secure platforms where you can analyze data and discover insights without any personal data leaving the safety of the closed system. Google’s Ads Data Hub is probably the most advanced clean room at the moment, but it’s not just Google – Amazon, LiveRamp, Unilever and a host of other massive companies are developing their own, as well as a new breed of companies looking to develop specialist technology and expertise to get the most out of clean rooms.

There are a number of ways you can use clean rooms, but the basic principle is that it acts as a space to combine your first party data with data from publishers, from third party providers or even other brands, so you can analyze rich datasets together without ever having access to user-level information.

The exciting thing about clean rooms is they open up opportunities for data collaboration that simply haven’t been available before.

Things like:

1. Getting behind the walled gardens – In the old world, the walled gardens guarded their data fiercely. There were very few opportunities for you to compare first-party against the data held by Facebook or Twitter or Amazon. But in clean rooms, it becomes possible – you can connect your data with data held by a walled garden and discover much deeper audience insights without it ever leaving their control.

2. Getting closer to publishers – You can connect your first-party data with audience data from publishers to cross-reference your audience with the consumers actually visiting that publisher’s site.

3. Connecting with other brands – This is perhaps the most innovative use of clean rooms, where they allow for one brand to connect their first-party data with the data of another brand (ie second-party data). This provides an opportunity for companies in adjacent spaces (think, airlines and car hire brands, or restaurants and food-delivery apps) to safely pool their data to discover mutually beneficial insights.

Particularly right now when the future still contains a fair amount of uncertainty, the best approach is to be as agnostic as possible:

1. For the best insights… train campaigns that use both authenticated data and anonymous data.

2. For the maximum reach… test lots of ID frameworks that work across both ‘open’ and ‘closed’ buying platforms.

3. And for the best performance… target campaigns with both authenticated and anonymous solutions.

AR – Lastly, the uncertainty of these developments has painted a negative picture of the cookieless environment. In your opinion, what are the opportunities arising out of this evolution of the digital ecosystem?

The data privacy of consumers will get strengthened.
Will help evolve new technologies and models which will help do the advertising but keeping in mind the data privacy.
First-party data for Brands will get strengthened.
For publishers, this is an opportunity to truly gain control over their data and build robust first-party data strategies around compliance and transparency. The quality of data that will emerge from this switch will be far superior to what third-party-data vendors or agencies can provide today.
The role of DMPs and CDPs to process and enrich their data become vital. Data lake technologies demand will become higher.