Why advertisers must rethink their digital marketing strategy now more than ever

But the devil is in the details. Google says it will give Chrome users the choice of whether or not to accept third-party cookies. 

In other words, Google seems poised to imitate on the web what Apple has implemented in the app world with ATT (i.e., iOS users can accept or refuse the equivalent of third-party cookies on apps), which, as a reminder, has an opt-in rate of just around 30%.

As Safari and Firefox have already deployed mechanisms impacting third-party cookies, it seems essential to anticipate that while third-party cookies may not disappear completely, they will likely only be relevant for a minority of Internet users.

Affecting targeting, retargeting, and measurement, these cookies have been essential to most digital marketing strategies, primarily through the famed marketing funnel: awareness > engagement > conversion > retention. By extension, an advertiser's ability to achieve their commercial objectives (acquiring new customers, sales, retention, etc.) will sooner or later be impacted by cookie scarcity.

Server-side measurement, ID providers, CDP, data clean room, MMM, Privacy Sandbox—today's marketers can choose from a wide range of innovative yet difficult-to-decipher tools and approaches.

But while some should be tested immediately to get ahead of the game, we've noticed that some advertisers tend to commit to deploying these solutions without simultaneously overhauling their digital marketing strategy. In other words, they don't give enough thought to how these innovative approaches can be integrated into their strategy to derive synergies and, ultimately, get the best results.

Advertisers, therefore, need to analyze precisely the impact of cookie scarcity on each stage of the funnel before completely overhauling their digital marketing strategy and then determine how to operationalize this strategy through innovative methods.

So, when it comes to rethinking your digital marketing strategy, where should you start? No need to look far: the answer already lies within your company.

Indeed, while third-party data has historically been the main fuel for marketing strategies, proprietary (first-party) data has been neglected for far too long.

Any new digital marketing strategy must, therefore, enable advertisers to make the most of their first-party data by prioritizing said data, fueling all new tactics, including AI systems. As Google announced, future digital marketing strategies will be first-party, modeled, and, of course, consent-based, in full compliance with privacy regulations.

To guide advertisers through this new paradigm, we have identified 4 major challenges around first-party strategy: 

1. Collection

Generally speaking, in the digital world, marketing teams are quite mature when it comes to data collection. However, to maximize performance, all points of contact (especially offline) must also be taken into account to become relevant marketing collection points (e.g., physical stores, call centers, etc.). 

At the same time, as consumers' expectations around data collection have profoundly evolved, advertisers will have to demonstrate the utmost transparency regarding this practice. To that end, education, consent granularity, and value exchanges are crucial to maximizing data collection (e.g., preference centers and commercial offers...).

2. Centralization

Marketing teams often believe they have no control over their company's proprietary data, which is typically scattered across numerous IT systems. This preconceived idea can result in a lack of knowledge regarding existing data and a certain frustration or even discouragement from these teams, given the effort and time required to make it available (e.g., internal discussions, identifying which resources to mobilize, finding bandwidth, etc.). In other words, it creates the sensation that proprietary data is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

In this sense, centralizing first-party data and reconciling it at the "individual" level within a data marketing platform is a significant challenge for agility and performance.

3. Usability

This paradigm shift, which places first-party data at the heart of digital marketing strategy, requires advertisers to personalize the data they collect and thus maximize the collection of contact data (email, phone numbers, etc.). Therefore, an omnichannel identification and opt-in marketing strategy must be thought through.

In addition, the scaling up of proprietary data use, combined with new operational marketing tactics, means that marketers must stay in close contact with their legal and compliance teams. Indeed, we regularly observe difficulties for marketers in clearly expressing to legal teams their business expectations concerning first-party data and penalizing associated projects for lack of consensus. As the topic is new to all employees, marketers need to do a great deal of work explaining business expectations and pre-identifying compliance issues upstream to facilitate informed arbitration by legal teams. For example, to caricature slightly, limiting requests to "I would like to send nominative data to major platforms" without indicating the associated purpose will undoubtedly lead to refusal by compliance teams. It might be better to specify whether this data will be used for activation, exclusion, aggregate measurement, or as "fuel" for algorithms. 

4. Operationalization

It may seem obvious, but the operational implementation of a new digital marketing strategy must take the form of a catalog of use cases, formalizing all the issues at stake (business objectives, scenarios, data collected and activated, technical prerequisites, compliance prerequisites, associated RACI...). This catalog will then be prioritized, taking into account different levels of complexity and associated business impacts, to provide teams with a genuine strategic and operational digital marketing roadmap.

Lastly, a key success factor will be getting all stakeholders on board from the start of this strategic overhaul. Given the cross-functional nature of the work to be carried out, many teams (media, CRM, compliance, IT, data) will need to be on board, and many historical silos will need to be eliminated if this new strategy is to be as effective as possible (e.g., media vs. CRM).

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In conclusion, here are 3 ways to start building your first-party data assets for marketing purposes: 

• Immediately involve your compliance team in the ins and outs of this colossal project, and appoint a Program Manager to embody and steer the transformation, 
• Define a first-party digital marketing strategy, starting, for example, with an audit of the impact of the end of third-party cookies on the entire funnel and an audit of your company's ability to build marketing-oriented first-party assets.
• Select and prioritize new measures to integrate into your digital marketing strategy and deploy them in coordination. 

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