For a long time, the holy grail of marketing has been 1:1 custom tailored messaging. While this sounds simple, it’s very complex to actually come close to this because deploying such a program at scale is difficult from the operational point of view even in the best of conditions.
So over the past decade or so we’ve seen a vast number of technologies rise to attempt to help brands achieve this goal. However, following the revelations of Cambridge Analytica we’ve seen efforts from both legal and technical fronts (such as the General Data Protection Regulation and Intelligent Tracking Protection ) attempt to reign in the ability of the ad tech industry to invade people’s privacy in the name of profit or influence.
Lately, we saw several efforts in the past two months. Apple launched App Tracking Transparency. Google announced that folks could opt out of the GAID(Google Advertising ID) in an upcoming Android release. Apple announced plans for Mail Tracking Protection, Private Relay and Hide My Email. Finally, this past week Adobe announced they are closing down their Device Co-Op. This is to say nothing of the efforts in legal arenas seeking to close down the use of data for marketing purposes without consent.
I think it’s time that marketers take a look at the landscape and realize a shift of strategy may be in order. Adobe, in the statement about the Device Co-Op, outlines the impact to Adobe Audience Manager, The Real-time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Target, and Adobe Advertising Cloud. In the statement about the CDP specifically they say:
There are no plans to modify the current Audience Manager Data Management Platform (DMP). However, the deprecation of third-party cookies will likely create scale challenges for most DMP users. To help customers evolve their data management practices, Adobe is encouraging the reduction of dependencies on identifiers that will face restrictions in the coming year. Marketing teams must build first-party data strategies focused on durable identifiers that include personally identifiable information (PII), which can be solved for with Real-time Customer Data Platform (Real-time CDP).
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/device-co-op/using/about/device-co-op-eol.html
However even this will be tricky. Industry efforts (such as Unified ID 2.0) depend on the user supplying personal information (such as a email address) to the site, which can then be used as a key for ad selection. Apple’s upcoming ‘Hide my Email’ feature means that for as little of $0.99 cents a month anyone on Apple’s platforms can create an one time email alias. In effect they could give every website a different email address, and if the addresses don’t match, you can’t associate the activity with the profile.
So perhaps use IP Address? I would discourage this. IP Address for geo-location and identification has a number of issues, and it’s about to get worse. Intelligent Tracking Protection will gain the ability to automatically hide the IP Address of trackers classified by the machine learning system. Apple’s new Private Relay will hide the IP Address of all network traffic, not just known trackers.
Apple has issued the following statement in the session on Private Relay:
In general, your servers and websites should stop solely relying on client IP address to determine user location or identity.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10096/
It’s clear to me that shifting to a first party marketing strategy is going to be critical as we move toward the holidays. Most of these changes will be publicly deployed prior to the holiday season and should in the upswing of their adopt curve prior to Black Friday. Even if brands fail to adapt this year, I suspect we’ll hit a critical mass where they will have to next year if they want to remain competitive.
On the Web, we’ve seen anti-tracking tech deployed by virtually every browser except Chrome. Google recently made some commitments to the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority on it’s phase out of 3rd party cookies. I feel however this is not going to slow the tide of privacy advancements for long and should not be relied on as a saving grace for marketing tactics which include 3rd party cookies.
We’ve seen the deployment of App Tracking Transparency and now even Google is starting to lock down Android. While it’s unlikely to reach the same restrictiveness of iOS – it should be clear that the Mobile ecosystem is going to continue to be locked down at this point, realities already acknowledged by changes in the advertising platforms for both Google and Facebook post iOS14.5.
Finally, this year, Apple has taken target at email marketing efforts and technologies that can be used to profile users. These two will become more difficult to work with, and brands who deploy such tech will need to take s serious look at their longer term efforts. What will they do if even these stop working for a large user segment?
I don’t have all the answers – but I do agree and echo Adobe’s advice to shift to a 1st party identifier and marketing strategy. I just don’t think sticking with the existing methods will work out well long term, either they will face regulation, or cease working entirely due to technology changes.
In the coming weeks leading up to iOS 15 I’ll look at each of these efforts and offer my thoughts on what the impact to Analytics, Optimization and Personalization may ultimately be. I hope you join me as we evaluate all the recently announced changes and examine what should be looked at, and in what order.