'Building capabilities should not be restricted to building targeting options'

It’s time for the marketers, advertisers, and publishers to brace up for a value-driven technologically advanced customer engagement model to navigate the disruption that ‘cookiepocalypse’ has created in the online ecosystem, said Dimpy Yadav, General Manager, Xaxis India, at the 5th edition of the India Brand Conclave organized by the exchange4media Group. 

In a fireside chat on the topic- 'The Need for Privacy-friendly Solutions in a Post-Cookie World', with Nachiket Deole, Head of Sales, Double Verify, Yadav said that the phasing out of the third-party cookies in 2023 may have onset disruption in the online ecosystem, but with technologically advanced value-driven models in hand, advertisers feel very much in control, “This doesn’t mean that advertisers are handcuffed, there Is a lot of disruption but not limitation. It’s about challenging the existing ways of working and evolving from stage 1 to stage 3”, Yadav added. 

While Yadav pointed at different targeting metrics solutions like Google’s Privacy Sandbox, and Federated Learning of Cohorts which are helping clients navigate their ways, Deole highlighted the need for short-term, mid-term, and long-term solutions for building advertising strategies other than relying on first-party data harvesting. “We at DV have seen the demand for contextual advertising has essentially taken care of all privacy and cookie deprecation concept, it’s a solution that has grown to be more sophisticated”, he said. Deole added that by deploying technologies like semantics science or ontological expertise, advertisers can ensure that the content reaches the right audience. “We have seen tremendous success, not just in boosting CTR, but driving purchase intent and convergence”, added Deole.

A traditional keyword targeting relies on scanning the page content and then matching the content with keywords, but the marriage between the right content and the right audience, always remains a challenge. The ontological approach is contextual advertising helps clients in addressing the challenge of keyword targeting, “It’s AI that is helping you target based on people’s behavior, and search activities around what the common search has been, which makes it more contextual, added Yadav. She added how in the “new era of digital marketing” the measurement of a campaign has evolved from Click-Through Rates to data-driven attributions or on performance driven by the first-party data. The metrics have changed from the bounce rate and time spent on a website to a more qualitative attribute which is a ‘unique user time spent on a website. 

Yadav said the focus should be on data unification, overhauling data management techniques, partnering with other brands to share customer data, and creating a proper measurement stack to define and achieve an advertiser's or brand's objectives.

“Right now we have the entire marketing suite available in the industry, you talk about data activation, data collection, measurement, creative concepts, etc, it’s time that measurement needs to be factored in during the creation of the stack, not after deployment of it, so it has to be a value-driven model”, added Yadav. "Building capabilities should not be restricted to building targeting options but should be focused on creating a value-driven model that crafts an end-to-end journey in a holistic 360-degree manner", Yadav added.