It’s happened to you: you searched for something on the internet or clicked on an ad and in the next few days you were invaded by a lot of publicity on the subject everywhere. Sometimes it seems that it was enough for that something to cross your mind for the Mátrix to discover and start offering related offers and discounts. Much of that “magic” is produced by web cookies,a small digital file that is installed on your phone or computer and is able to collect huge amounts of information about consumption habits and interests and accompany users wherever they go on the internet.
But the “magic” of cookies, as common as flour and sugar cookies, is about to change for something risky: personalized tracking, on an internet with more and more fences and fences. With cookies, advertisers collect demographic details about potential consumers,their location, the browser they use, and browsing history, allowing them to select the target audience for their ads. Custom tracking, on the other hand, will have all that information with the name and contact of its owners.
It will be a radical change for the marketing sector. Google and Apple,internet gateways for billions of people on the planet (I wrote well: billions), will restrict the installation of cookies through their platforms, such as measures to control consumer privacy abuses.
Not everything has been negative with cookies: these files have allowed online browsing without too many frictions. Without cookies that keep our online service access credentials “alive,” for example, we would have to login almost every time we click on a Facebook link or when we add products to our shopping cart in an e-commerce store. The idea that we are approaching a “world without cookies”, as many have spread, is a bit bitter… or a little naive.
Cookies will not disappear. What disappears is the possibility that anyone can install them through Apple’s Chrome browser, Google, and iPhone apps. What is certainly a lot: Chrome is installed on 7 out of 10 computer devices on the planet and the operating system of iPhones, the iOS, is located on 30% of phones with internet connection.
Google will be the only one that will be able to install cookies in Chrome and, in the case of Apple, app developers must be explicit about the tracking tools activated in each application, so that the user decides whether or not to accept the tracking of their fingerprint.
The paradigm of third-party cookies will be replaced by a data collection environment with the consent of its owners. It will be a disruption for those who based their business models on the collection of data through cookies. Digital marketing, with its army of engineers and behavioral science experts, based some of its strategies on that small archive to snoop on the movements of internet users.
The model was known as “third-party cookie” or “third-party data”, information collected by third parties, and allowed services such as programmatic advertising: the sale of digital advertising spaces made through artificial intelligence systems (robots). Programmatics caused distortions in the advertising ecosystem and encouraged the massification of cookies: automated advertising demanded more and more audience segmentations, more details about consumers so that the shots were more likely to hit the target.
The programmatic also returned comodinos to many content site sales agents (publishers), who preferred to deliver their advertising inventories to automated services (resellers) as an easy way to continue billing from a high volume of traffic on their sites or applications.
The third-party data also created a dark data market, marketplaces dedicated to forming and selling bags of data collected from whatever source was available (data brokers). “The third-party cookie was always an issue of little transparency and very little confidence,” said Douglas Montalvao,general manager of Adobe Hispanoamerica,a software company with digital audience measurement and consumer data management (Customer Data Platform) solutions.
For the purpose of third-party cookies, marketing professionals will keep the data collected from first-party and second-party sources. It seems obvious, but it is important to point it out because here lies the paradigm shift. The new model will be based on tracking with data from identified or identifiable people, much richer than the information collected by cookies, and integrating repositories with personal information from private or public sources through transfers, said Luis Cortázar,digital media consultant and specialist in advertising and digital media.
A marketer could explain this change as follows: the consumer will be at the heart of the digital business strategy. You will be right, but it presents great risks to the privacy and protection of personal data, as well as challenges to national regulations: data subjects will be forced – motivated, corrected by the marketer – to deliver personal information to all digital services until they lose control and, above all, anonymity.
“That’s for sure. Publishers will work on their data identification models to build their first-party data,” said Christiane de Carvalho, VP, Business Development & Strategy of Acxiom, a consumer analytics company founded in 1969. The challenge, he said, is to do so with standards that allow interoperability between different identification models, as if it were convertibility between currencies from different countries.
“The ones that are going to lose the most are small companies and slow companies” in adapting to the new paradigm, said De Carvalho, representative of a company that has more than 83 million records in Mexico, 20 million mail accounts and 40 million telephone numbers.
Those who have not developed this user registration model should migrate as soon as possible to individual identifiers, replacing the mountains of information collected through cookies, most of the time anonymous. The third-party cookie, Cortázar said, always demanded enormous work to link a specific person to their particular fingerprint.
It will be like going to a mall where all stores and services ask for identification at the entrance and install each visitor a tracking chip for as long as they remain on site. This is part of what is known on the internet as the fenced garden: enclosed and controlled environments where the user is identified and their behavior and consumption habits are known.
Without cookies, installed at the phone or computer level, tracking visitors between different sites will be much more difficult, unless there are data transfer alliances between those sites or “data at the person level” services are contracted. This is the “second-party data” model and works to the extent permitted by the personal data protection legislation of each country.
Personal information records may include name, email, socioeconomic status, date of birth, purchase behaviors, interests, occupation and lifestyle, even if you have a credit card and the model of the devices with which people connect to the internet (not the same as an iPhone 12 user, a model of more than 20,000 pesos , that one of Motorola with Android, 2,000 pesos).
Without third-party cookies, advertising campaigns will lose between 20 and 30% effectiveness, a margin that will be more than rewarded with paradigm shifting, with higher sales and return on investment, calculates Julia Sant Ambrosio,commercial leader of Marketing Effectiveness for Nielsen Latam, a firm specialized in audience measurement.
“We have prepared for this change, we understand how the consumer is,we understand the measurement options we’re going to have from now on and in the meantime we take care of doing deeper consumer research,” Sant Ambrosio said.
Adobe‘s Douglas Montalvao is optimistic: the end of third-party cookies will end the obscurantism of digital tracking, in a new relationship between digital providers and consumers. “The consumer has the power to decide how and how they will share their data. Companies should wonder how to convince the customer to share their information. It will be a relationship of greater trust and transparency created from consent.”
The “magic” with which the internet read our minds will not disappear, it will only become a more precise form based on personal data with greater market relevance and economic value. And in many cases, with the consent of the holders of the personal data. Replacing third-party cookies with custom tracking will only tighten the clamps for monitoring and tracking consumers.
Source: CE NoticiasFinancieras