‘Contextual marketing & gathering first-party data to be key in the cookieless world

As the marketing world is gearing up for a cookieless world and trying to navigate the impact of the changes ahead, industry leaders discussed the effects and alternatives to third-party cookies and more at the E4M-Group M Programmatic Summit on Tuesday.

The session titled ‘Cookieless & Contextual Targeting’ was chaired by Medhavi Singh, Country Director - Enterprise, Criteo, and included Abhishek Sankhe, VP - Marketing | Head of Digital & MarTech, Sharekhan, Mihhiir Lakhani, Head of Marketing, NMIMS Global & Programmatic Industry Expert, Saugata Bagchi, Global Head - Digital, Experiential & Content Marketing, Tata Communications and Shveta Singh, Chief Digital Officer & Managing Partner, Motivator, GroupM.

Explaining the impact of the cookieless world on sectors like BFSI, Abhishek Sankhe said: “The problem statement is that for the zero party, first party and second party cookies generally the volumes are low, the volume per se for third party cookies is high, hence, the impact is going to be huge when third party cookies go away entirely. Secondly in our industry, specifically with BFSI, we have tried for too long on bottom funnel campaigns. We spend a certain amount and try to get conversions out of it and that's a very salesy approach towards the marketing campaigns. That has been the norm for decades. Now, as the third-party cookies move away, we might have to relook at the entire marketing stack.”

As for Saugata Bagchi contextual marketing will have to be picked up to mitigate the impact of cookieless advertising. “So, the more contextual we are, the more addressability we can bring into our conversation. It also will help us give a higher degree of attribution to convergence across industries, across different audiences, and categories as we go ahead. So, like I said, I see good days ahead. One thing is, I'll have to go and ask my boss about experimentation budgets, the second thing is the marketing AOP, their annual operating income template has to change.”

Mihhiir Lakhani also suggested that not just gathering first-party data but using all necessary alternatives in the right manner keeping the user behaviour in mind will get the necessary results. “As they've suggested, we need to look at first-party data and some of the other solutions. What's most important for us is to ensure that we can collect first-party data, stitch it together, make it meaningful, and use engagement with the first-party data to try and make it richer so that we can segment it sharper. Of course, that's not going to be sufficient, right? Because that's like water and well which can get over anytime. So, we need to create a bowl of the audience coming from all other methods that are possible, be it contextual targeting or using the partnership with certain platforms or advertising on certain platforms.”

Commenting from an agency perspective, Shveta Singh says that the agencies are already prepared for the change. “Coming to the agency side and wearing the GroupM hat, we've already felt the impact. It's not that we will feel the impact. As we've been anticipating this change, and this conversation has been happening, and gradually cookies and IDs are getting deprecated, so we've been preparing for this day for some time now.

So, while the impact will be there, it will be mitigated largely because the platforms and agencies have already pivoted. Even the platforms have gradually pivoted from cookies and device IDs to better deterministic identifiers.”