As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, privacy protection, which is most obviously reflected in the abolition or blocking of third-party cookies, has caused tectonic changes in digital advertising, and as such in ever-present digital media.
Huge changes are happening in this field because over more recent years, digital advertising has become “dependent” on third-party cookies. How could it not rely on it, when you take into account the fact that cookies are what lead advertisers to exactly where they need to be and who they need to be shown to by said individual’s preferences?
In addition to targeted ads, cookies also enable advertisers to measure their own campaign results, user profiling and optimisation, all with the aim of achieving the best possible marketing results. However, third party cookies are increasingly being blocked by users and web browsers themselves due to privacy protection issues.
For example, the Safari browser has already discontinued them, and the consequences of such practices can be seen in the Zadar agency Telum, which is a marketing agency that has been involved in the creation, management and optimisation of Internet marketing campaigns for fourteen years now. The most important goal of marketing is performance, i.e. earnings and the growth of the client.
“When it comes to measuring the success of campaigns, we’re already noticing that 50 percent of solutions that rely on third party cookies become invisible precisely because of their rejection,” explained Mario Ivic, the founder and director of the Zadar agency Telum.
The situation will become even more difficult when one of the leading web browsers, Google’s very own wildly popular Chrome, also chooses to block their use, which has already been announced for the third quarter of 2024. The consequences of such a move will be felt not only by advertisers but also by digital media.
“Everything starts with the advertiser themselves. They should adapt the measurement of campaign results to the increasingly frequent blocking of third party cookies. If they don’t, they’ll lose a lot of information, and this affects the quality of data optimisation. That being said, a much bigger problem is that with weaker targeting and user segmentation capabilities, campaigns become less efficient, and therefore less well paid. This inevitably spills over to publishers, that is, digital media, who have to reckon with a smaller number of advertisers and lower prices,” explained Ivic.
Advertisers and digital media must therefore adapt to these new market conditions, and the solution, says Ivic, who is also the co-owner of Midas Network, a platform for native advertising, is in the preparation of technology for “first party” data, which enables user profiling on only one single domain.
“This somewhat reduces the quality of the data, but there are solutions that minimise this effect. These are CDP (Customer Data Platform) or DMP (Data Management Platform) solutions that enable user segmentation. By standardising these segments, over time, you can achieve a situation in which advertising becomes almost as good as it was with third party cookies,” Ivic pointed out, and adding that some publishers are already using these solutions, while others haven’t even started preparing for this yet.
The Zadar agency Telum, a marketing agency that stands out of the crowd for its own development of digital tools that help clients make their campaigns more successful, is also working on a solution to this problem, and that saw it placed on Deloitte’s ranking of the fastest growing technology companies in Central Europe for three years in a row (from 2016 to 2018).
However, Ivic doesn’t want to reveal much at all until the product is fully developed, so he just briefly pointed out that the software should be on the market in about three to four months, and its specialty will be that it will be the first solution adapted to the specifics of the Croatian market and at the same time be the only Croatian solution of that category for digital advertising using first party data.
Telum’s brand new digital tool should be an additional tailwind for the company that has carried out more than three thousand campaigns to date, which achieved 18 percent growth in revenue in 2021, and which should be even higher in 2022. It should help advertisers and digital media minimise the negative effects of privacy protection policies and cookie blocking.
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