Page 24 - Adnews Magazine May-June 2021

Investigation
size fits all solution for the mar- keters to replace cookies.
“There are many things that are being sorted out but while that’s happening it presents an opportu- nity for us to also look at what we have been doing,” she says.
“Should we be continuing to try to do the same thing with a differ- ent solution, or is it an opportunity to reassess how we manage the budgets and how we manage our focus and marketing goals.
“I think it’s time to consider how we might do it differently, how we can start to help brands tell better stories. So that means that conceptual targeting and being contextually relevant with the right message can be power- ful. There could be ways to test whether the data targeting is more effective for business results versus more broader
targeting, which actually might work better. So I think it’s time to test that and see what happens.”
Other media buyers are also signaling a rise in contextual targeting as a result of the demise of third-party cookies.
“Contextual advertising will rise, by how much I can’t say,” Collier says.
“Big scale advertisers have been constantly focusing on contextual as well as audience targeting in the first place. I think what’s going to be impor- tant is to think about what message you’re putting in, I think it’s time to also look at how you’re going to build your brand amongst those contextual environments because media alone can’t achieve the best results.
“There are a lot of stats going around with 50, 60% of marketing effectiveness is about the message. So, I think it’s time to also assess how the marketers are considering how they allocate their resources to brand-building and creative as well as media.”
As a sign of the boom that’s expected to come, Goldman Sachs invested a reported US$75 million in contextual advertising technology company GumGum.
“There’s talk about the return of contextual targeting as being one consequence of these changes and people are quite welcoming of that. It’s almost like a return to simpler times,” says Frontier Australia head of digital Paul Freeman-Sanderson.
“I think that will be a growing consideration but in a more sophisticated way, so using other more context-specific creative and taking into account factors like device, time of day, and what have you.
“I think certainly contextual targeting will have a bigger role to play. As an agency, we have a wide range of clients, but we do work with a lot of advertisers who are on the smaller side and they might not necessarily have a significant scale of their own first- party data so we’ll certainly need to look at aligning more so than we have with publishers that have scaled solutions in that area where we can take a client’s database and match it to that publisher’s user base and extrapolate that across their users. “So there will definitely be changes in the way that we go about executing campaigns but with a lot of these changes and evolutions in the industry it’s hard to know the full impact until you’re in the weeds of it and testing things and
seeing what’s effective and what isn’t.”
Google’s move to block third-party cookies could also have significant implications for publishers, which is why the tech giant says it’s working with the
industry to prepare them for the changes.
According to analysis by the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, blocking cookie information reduced average publisher revenue by around 70%. The decline is a result of advertisers’ decreased ability to engage in effective targeted
advertising without access to information from cookies.
Google’s own research in 2019 showed that the average revenue from programmatic advertising decreased by 52% for publishers when third-
party cookies were disabled.
The ACCC says that submissions from publishers to its inquiry showed
similar concerns, with publishers noting that the availability of data for ad targeting significantly affects their ad revenues.
“For example, The Daily Mail submits that the restriction of third-party cookies that are used in ad targeting on web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Safari decreases advertiser spend by 45 to 65%,” the ACCC says.
IAB’s Jaanimagi says that publishers, along with all industry platers, need to actively work together on a solution that suits them.
“Everyone needs to step back and work out what their strategy is for this,” he says.
“Who do they need to work with on it in terms of technology vendors and partners.”
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