The value of current technology platforms is decreasing
The race for audience technology platforms was fierce for the past few years. Advertising and marketing ad stacks extensively sought out Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and Consumer Data Platforms (CDPs) among other investments.
Sizable investments were made in data warehouses and modeling audience segments. Distinct strategies and channels for known versus unknown users allowed these platforms to play their roles and keep the course.
Almost every brand or major publisher needed to demonstrate the value of their audience. From contextual targeting, the industry shifted to audience-based targeting that required the scaled usage of these platforms.
But now, with so many changes occurring concurrently and in the near future, businesses must re-consider platform investments.
We are in a time of incredible flux. Covid-19 has changed many of our behaviors and interactions with brands.
But that is only a part of the tidal wave of challenges ahead. We also need to consider cookies, data clean rooms, clouds, and cohorts.
Cookies, clean rooms, clouds, and cohorts
To exacerbate the current situation are the looming challenges of cookies, clean rooms, clouds and cohorts:
Cookies are getting phased out
Succumbing to their demise, these convenient identifiers phase out of their existence on Chrome in early 2022, which removes the normal mode of operations for audience targeting, measurement, optimization and attribution. Safari and Firefox have already made these updates.
Visibility is gradually reducing and change is inevitable. Given the massive implications, you cannot afford to wait it out until the last minute before you adapt to these changes. With each day, you are losing ground.
Data clean rooms are on the rise
As cookies phase out, sharing data becomes more crucial. Businesses need an easy, privacy-safe way to share data, whether between advertisers and publishers or between two publishers or with retailers/channel partners.
Fragmentation is everywhere, and the only way to get your hands on high fidelity data is to strike up data share agreements, and to leverage a data clean room to enable the partnership.
Most platform technologies cannot deliver on the infrastructure requirements of setting up and operating data clean rooms. And, because third party data has been so readily available, many companies have yet to develop this muscle.
Walled garden clouds are difficult to access
The new measurement normal shall be the brand’s ability to operate across the cloud environments of the walled garden platforms and their own first party data investment infrastructure.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides access to ad server log data, Facebook Advanced Analytics offers use cases utilizing Facebook’s cohort level data, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AWS) enables media performance against sales on Amazon.
The outcome is an IT-led, query-based effort to access data in the cloud that isn’t business friendly.