The disappearance of third-party cookies will have a major impact on marketing. In the July 17th NYCU, the ARF’s Paul Donato explained the impact on attribution. Here are excerpts from an article in Digiday on the implications for targeting.
In a little under a month, Apple’s restrictions on in-app tracking will kick in, and for mobile advertisers, the stakes are high. When Apple’s Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) starts to recede, apps have to explicitly ask a user to let them be tracked.
Most advertisers and their partners are working on the assumption that the IDFA’s prevalence towards in-app ads will shrink — as will anything that resembles them, given Apple’s aversion to targeted ads. The assumption among mobile marketers seems to be that asking users to create accounts within apps. This would generate data like emails or phone numbers, which are needed to sustain addressability in the absence of the IDFA. But there’s a chance Apple will break that process and force users to use its own, privacy-centric authentication service.
“We see advertisers increasing their spending while they have some deterministic identifiers on iOS devices,” said Mark Kellogg, director of partnerships at mobile analytics company Kochava. “Nobody knows what targeting and bidding are going to look like when 85% to 90% of iOS users are no longer identifiable; obviously advertisers are worried about spending wisely.”
As it stands there are few indicators out there, though Facebook has offered some perspective:
The social network has noticed a more than 50% drop in CPM prices, when personalized targeting was removed from the Audience Network of aggregated inventory across third-party apps. If advertising in apps becomes less efficient in the absence of hyper-targeted ads, then spending and subsequently the revenue it generates will drop. It’s a situation that could inadvertently push advertisers to Google’s Android platform where the economics are more favorable because of fewer restrictions on user-level tracking.
Behind the scenes, some advertisers are busy weighing the pros and cons of diverting some of those media dollars into contextual targeting. While contextual targeting has previously seemed far from precise compared to user-level targeting, advertisers are reassessing that stance given the lack of alternatives.
“Contextual targeting is going to be the new black in mobile advertising,” said Devon DeBlasio, product marketing director at ad tech vendor Neustar. “One-to-one advertising was a misnomer that marketers thought they were getting in place of just automation and efficiency from a media buying standpoint.”
Source: Joseph, S. (2020, August 28). ‘Contextual targeting is going to be the new black’: As IDFA restrictions loom, advertisers brace for the fallout. The Programmatic Marketer: Digiday.