Programmatic advertising already plays a significant and growing role in most marketers’ arsenals. Advertising on video platforms, connected TVs, audio content, and other digital formats looks to dominate the future as well. Savvy marketers need to solidify their strategies and investments for these opportunities, but things are changing quickly, and the future is unknown. The ongoing, anticipated demise of third-party cookies, growing privacy regulations, and browser feature changes raise some potentially tough questions for the forward-thinking marketer:
- Is programmatic advertising on digital and video platforms going to play a significant role in your future marketing mix, and if so, are you making strategies and investments to address these future opportunities?
- With third-party cookies going away, how will you continue to find addressable audiences that you can still target and measure accurately?
- How can you ensure that your media buying and measurement investments are robust and protected, given future uncertainty?
An essential part of the answer is your first-party data. Your first-party audiences are the prospects that you have consent-based permission to market to using their addressable information. You’ve obtained this through past transactions, permission-based opt-ins, partnerships, and primary data acquisition strategies. Many companies have under-developed first-party data in terms of scope, scale, and completeness, instead relying on addressing new audiences using third-party cookies. This has to change – first-party data will be king.
Another part of the answer is your toolset, which should include Google Display and Video 360 (DV360) and, more broadly, the Google Marketing Platform (GMP). DV360 is an enterprise DSP platform that enables campaign execution, including media planning, design, data management, media buying, measurement, and optimization. It opens vast amounts of ad inventory from diverse sources including Direct Deals, Google Preferred, YouTube Reserve, TrueView inventory, and third-party exchanges. It has powerful, native integration with Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Search Ads 360 (SA360), Google Analytics 360 (GA360) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Many marketers and their agencies are using DV360 to address unknown prospects with third-party cookies. With this capability being removed, we might intuit that we’d use DV360 less in the future. But this is not the case. DV360 and GMP are still the best tools to coordinate campaigns, target customers, access ad inventory, measure success, and track attribution – and you are already using them. The big shift for most will be using their first-party data as the major addressable audience within the toolset. First-party data will also be the key to unlocking and targeting unknown audiences in the future. DV360 and GMP offer advertisers the best opportunity to future-proof their programmatic advertising.
For media buying and measurement solutions to be as robust and future-proof as possible, advertisers need to invest in solutions that feature integration, first-party data solutions, and maximum measurement and addressability functionality. Using first-party data within the GMP and DV360 environment will enable you to use the many powerful features already integrated into the ad networks you need to access. These capabilities include:
- Using native integration between Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Search Ads 360, and Google Analytics 360 to manage orchestrated, sophisticated campaigns.
- Accessing contextual and Custom Intent Audiences as a way to target prospects based on their interests, even as their identity remains unknown, and hedge against third-party targeting loss.
- Accessing premium programmatic inventory across media formats driving the future of advertising, including video, audio, display, CTV/OTT, and rich media across the most prevalent ad networks and platforms.
- Using Google’s recommended tagging best practices (Google Tag Manager + Conversion Linker) or gtag sitewide snippet + gtat event snippets to ensure that you are setting cookies for the Google advertising and analytics ecosystem in a first-party context.
- Leveraging Google’s server-side tagging to create even more robust and secure tagging methods across your assets.
- Using Match ID and non-PII User ID to create identifiers that help measure offline conversions.
- Using first-party data and Customer Match to create lookalike audiences within GMP and DV360.
- Continuing to use Private identity graphs like Merkury, Neustar’s Fabric, and LiveRamp, which all have their own ID connections for brands to sync and target potential customers.
- Using the platform to harden your data handling processes to ensure they are consistently compliant, legal, and private over time and situations.
What should marketers do now to protect programmatic campaigns?
Marketers need to take action to be ready for their first-party future. The good news is that third-party cookies aren’t gone yet, so you have a little time to plan and improve for the new ways of advertising while also being able to learn and experiment with existing strategies still active. While not exhaustive, some actions marketers should consider are:
Ramp up your first-party data game:
First-party data will be your addressable audience. Gathering and using first-party data may require changes to your data collection and consent-gathering processes on your owned channels (e.g., store, app, ecommerce, etc.) Your organization will likely need new tools, data infrastructure, processes, skills, data governance, and many other new capabilities to successfully capture, analyze, and utilize first-party data for marketing in a consent- and privacy-friendly manner. Gaining customer consent will be mandatory, which means you will have to provide unique value to customers in exchange for their permission.
Choose the right audience ingestion method:
You need to establish high quality, repeatable processes for uploading your first-party data into DV360 that readies the data for optimal use. You will need to determine which audiences are suppressed, whitelisted, or blacklisted depending on how you want to limit marketing to certain audiences or websites. You may also figure out how third-party private identity graphs and partnerships are used to expand audience size and to append additional dimensions to your existing data. You may also determine whether you use manual uploads or automatic API integrations. The more planned and fixed the method is, the more you can automate and solidify your processes for efficiency, speed, quality, compliance, and legality.
Start experimenting and learning with the cool tools and test campaigns:
This is where you’ll see the benefits of DV360 with first-party data. Consider testing out features like Customer Match for similar audience prospecting, whitelisting, user segmentation, activity-based audiences, remarketing, recency suppression, and affinity audiences. The more you test, the more you’ll learn.
Integrate with CM360, SA360, GA360, and the rest of the GMP:
Connect your DV360 first-party data with Google’s other powerful tools to coordinate complex campaigns, monitor results, control spending, and determine attribution. Floodlight is Google’s conversion tracking system that uses tags in Campaign Manager 360. You can use these to measure and attribute both online and offline conversions across CM360, SA360, and DV360.
Experiment and learn with contextual marketing:
In the future, established targeting tactics such as contextual targeting will take the place of many third-party cookie-based audiences. Google is currently testing targeting solutions based on the Topics API within the larger context of the Privacy Sandbox. For example, Google may tag prospects anonymously as being interested in baking or in-market for car repair. You won’t know the identity, but you will get to target a relevant audience anonymously. Use this opportunity to test and learn with contextual marketing while you can still run parallel campaigns using third-party cookies.
Think about how marketing 101 basics might change (and work on getting them right):
Remember, good marketing is not just data and technology. You’ll be advertising to a mix of your own customers and new prospects. Make sure the other aspects of great marketing such as creative, messaging, offers, branding, experience, and so forth are all perfectly on point with your business objectives and campaign strategy.
The real first step: develop a first-party strategy for your marketing environment
It’s not uncommon for marketers to build their campaign environments and processes in an ad hoc fashion, trying out this or that program as they emerge and addressing opportunities as they come. The problem with this approach is that it rarely fulfills long-term business objectives, leaves the data incomplete, and often creates gaps in functionality or knowledge. The best approach is to develop a formal and complete first-party data strategy that aligns with both overall organizational needs and marketing-specific functions in a coordinated fashion. With a well-devised strategy, business objectives can be clearly aligned to the marketing technology environment (e.g., data, tools, partners, etc.), multiple teams can share a vision for where they are heading, and investment decisions and ROI can be clearly tracked. Marketing should lead the charge, with their colleagues in Sales, Operations, Support, and IT providing key inputs. Some of the dimensions of a complete strategy include:
Business and marketing objectives:
Determine what core business objectives are critical to the program, such as customer acquisition, revenue growth, marketing spend optimization, retention and loyalty, new market penetration, etc.
Customer and audience segmentation and prioritization:
Identify which types of customers are your targets: for example, which are most profitable, which are most likely to convert, which customers to suppress or avoid, etc.
Data:
Understand what data you currently have and which you need. Determine data acquisition strategies, including consent, privacy, and data security. Create a plan on how you’ll host, manage/handle, store, transfer/upload, and augment data.
Technology:
Figure out the “plumbing” within your tech environment, including database approaches, system architecture, which tools and vendors you’ll use, the role of the cloud, security, and the build out and management of technology.
Campaign design and processes:
Design a consistent set of processes for campaign strategies and briefs, coordinating data uploads, performing analysis and segmentation, assigning tags, getting campaign data into GMP, activation strategies, etc.
Information partners:
Identify third parties who can provide data or augment existing data, including private identity graph vendors, partner networks, and data partnerships with other non-competitive companies.
Agency partners:
Choose agency partners who have deep experience in programmatic marketing and the Google Marketing Platform and are able to bring specialized expertise in various aspects of campaign execution, such as analysts, campaign coordinators, creatives, etc.
Skills and people:
Determine which new skills need to be developed within your team and how they are going to acquire them. Identify gaps in personnel that need to be filled.
Governance, compliance, privacy, and security:
Develop a plan to put the tools, processes, and oversight in place to ensure data is compliant with all privacy laws and policies. Formalize procedures so they are consistently applied over time without needing a lot of manual, ad hoc oversight.
The deprecation of the third-party cookie puts us all in a position of change and action. We know we will have to work differently in the future, so it’s the perfect time to rethink how we approach our programmatic marketing strategy and environment. We also can be pretty sure that other changes we don’t yet know about will emerge in the programmatic marketing space, so the smart play is to get your first-party data and marketing environment in a high-performing state so that you will remain agile and competitive even as the world throws us new twists and turns. First-party data and DV360/GMP should be front and center in your plans.
