No cookies for you Mr. Digital Marketer! What you gonna do?
It's time to gear up for change. It's time to learn!
Welcome to the 7th Issue of The Funnel Chemistry! A lot has been happening around the world. My lower back ache kept me from sitting down continuously and hence I have followed the news a little lazily rather. But now all’s well and I expect to be back to full working potential soon.
Background
For the past month or so, I have been thinking about the future of Internet and how things might be shaping. There are two specific news items that caught my attention.
The Australian Government has come up with a new set of regulations that if online media platforms were to use journalistic content from their country they better pay up! Both companies have their problems with this. Facebook has been more aggressive on this than google. You can read the latest from BBC about it here.
This is a clear indicator to me that content distribution on the Internet is about to change. It’s not only the Aussies, the Brits and the Europeans are thinking seriously about this too. Things might after all turn to be favorable to content creators who want to monetize.
The second piece of news is about a new app called Wave that promises complete privacy in terms of browsing. It has been in beta testing for the past five months and has investors from both India and France. If you are interested to try, you can look at it here. There has been a surge in terms of downloads of the app which is quite unprecedented. Though search engines like Duck Duck Go have been around for a while, the popularity of this new app is something that cannot go unnoticed.
This is also another indicator that ads, and user data collection are going to take a hit in the future. More or less these two pieces of news are clear indicators of the changes that are going to happen that can shake the foundations of the current Internet and Internet based business models.
And that’s the reason why I am beginning to assemble knowledge around the next set of developments. I intend to write about them time to time. Hence this week’s issue.
The Cookie-less World
As digital Marketers, we all know that the razor sharp targeting, re-targeting and re-marketing options given out by digital platforms is because of the user data that these platforms collect and The Cookie is at the heart of such technology.
A digital world without that cookie is presently unimaginable.
But the raising resistance to advertisements and the retaliation to ad-fraud are high. And Internet users are slowly realizing that their free ticket to internet is actually turning out to be expensive.
Internet Consumer’s voice is strong. And companies like Google are responding.
Google recently announced that they are going to say good-bye to third party cookies and going cookie-less by 2022. Mozilla Fire-Fox has been blocking 3rd party cookies since a year and so is Apple’s Safari Browser.
Though cookies aren’t going to go away anytime soon, we are moving one step towards a more private world than the current one. This is a good sign. Here are a few articles that have caught my attention this week and I wish to share them with you. I hope you’d have an overview of what is going on.
6 Reasons Cookie-Based Marketing Has Gone Stale
In this article you will read briefly about why cookies are going away. One of the most strongest reasons that I found was “They aren’t future proof.” This article seems to point out that it is definitive that in the future, the cookie is indeed going to crumble.
Digital Marketing In A Cookie-Less Internet
Before I say a word, this Forbes article is a must read. It is succinct, yet gives a deep overview of how the cookie-less world is going to look like from different perspectives. One of the most interesting predictions the author makes is that Facebook is directly in a position to gain the best leverage in this situation. It is evident from this article that there is going to be some chaos as tools that depend on 3rd party cookies are now going to find out alternative ways. And in the meanwhile, the Netizen can have a breather in terms of his/her privacy.
Identity-resolution in a cookieless world
This Economic Times article presents the ideas from a panel discussion with Amit Kumar Rai, head of media operations at Car Dekho, and Nitin Sethi, vice president - digital, Indigo. They both present alternative scenarios for identifying users and tracking their data and feel that marketers have to move towards more opt-in and permission based tactics than relying on easy 3rd party cookie data. You must read this article, in case you want to gain perspectives into what the big brands are already thinking and doing!
Cookieless Future: “The real power stays in the hands of the advertisers," says Neil Patel
No digital marketer worth his/her salt would have grown in the field without hearing about Neil Patel! So, Here’s his take on the cookie less world. Interestingly, he seems to believe that the power will tip towards Customer Data Platforms. These are marketer managed platform that can share unified customer data and information across applications. He also says that while this will not be the end of programmatic advertising, things will definitely shift towards other cookie-less technologies.
How to use this knowledge?
While you may not have any immediate application areas, it is always a requirement to keep updated about what is going to change in the future and how it would impact you as a digital marketer.
Best thing is create a google alert using the key-word “cookieless world” and you will get to see a daily/weekly update on what’s going on. If you are a content creator like me, you know how to exactly churn the content!
Next Steps
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Those are the words for this week! See you next Thursday with another exciting topic!