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There seems to be a common understanding amongst digital marketers and AdTech executives that the answer to a cookie-less, IDFA*-less world is the closest possible imitation of the scenario we have today:
*IDFA: “Identifier for Advertisers” in the Apple ecosystem, to become opt-in with the introduction of App Tracking Transparency in Spring 2021 (also, with “cookie-less” we refer to “3rd-party-cookie-less” in upcoming versions of Chrome and current versions of competing browsers).
So, if the balance of power was clearly tilted towards a messy middle packed with brokers, filters, and data providers as of January 2021, a cookie-less world must, OF COURSE, look exactly the same a year later.
Thus, where we had cookies and mobile phone IDs OF COURSE we must have a single identifier or pattern that deduplicates audiences across third-party media and first-party environments.
How could this be otherwise? OF COURSE, people expect a “relevant” message at the right time and place, which OF COURSE can only be attained by piecing together a single view of every member of the audience.
Why? Because OF COURSE we obtain better ROI when we get higher click-through rates. Never mind the fact that only a handful of purely-digital businesses are able to ascertain the manner in which those clicks turn into actual sales (or greater annoyance and a damaged brand).
Has anyone pondered the remote possibility that things go in the entirely opposite direction?
How about looking deeper for a second and reflecting on the very reason behind the end of cookies, the end of IDFA, etc.?
Is it privacy laws in the form of the GDPR or the CPRA? Is it Apple trying to sell more devices?
I’d say it is much simpler: People are fed up.
Politicians sense this – hence the law. Apple notices this – hence the pitch. Google has probably validated the trend with plenty of data – hence the product and strategy changes.
Let’s then imagine that people DO end up deciding where and when they choose to “be deduplicated”. Forget consent. Or rather, Consent Management Platform-driven “consent”. Picture REAL control, effective transparency. Things happening because they are the most logical consequence of a particular action, and not because we build the latest gimmick to trick an audience into “opting-in”.
Did we not aspire to Customer Centricity? Why then put the locus of control so far away from customers? In case it isn’t sufficiently clear, that is what shared IDs, fingerprinting, and clickwrap consent actually do: ensure that advertisers and brokers remain in control of people’s data, options, and choices.
The future is not about building more barriers but, instead, about sharing more and adjusting our offering to the real needs of our potential customers. And sneaky methods are proving terrible at ascertaining such needs.
Building a single customer view means absolutely nothing if every vendor on the face of the earth creates their own version of it: a redundant and flawed digital caricature of every individual busy enough to agree to a cookie consent cluster bomb. An integrated view should instead boil down to a set of preferences and needs managed by customers. With varying degrees of decentralization, on the basis of the level of public adoption of edge-based solutions.
How can that ever be articulated? Interoperability is, I believe, the magic word. It transforms “Identity” into “personal agency”, whether in the form of individual control panels (cross-medium, cross-supplier, cross-channel) or, eventually, through fully decentralized personal data stores.
Best of all, the real cookie will be on the other side: deduplicating a brand across multiple channels. Omni channel brands are not those that can creepily chase people around until they find a way to escape their own shadow. They are instead those that can allow free consumers to track THEM across multiple channels, providing a Single Brand View for consumers to decide when and where to show their preferences and needs.
The opposite of a Single Brand View is, after all, Brand Centricity. Which is where we are.
