Singapore – While a privacy-first internet is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, advertisers and companies are not withheld from disclosing the real pains of transitioning and adapting to a cookieless digital space when Google dropped the news of cookie deprecation in 2020.
Advertisers were, however, granted a breather, when the cookies phase-out, originally eyed by the tech giant in 2022 had been delayed a bit further into 2022.
Shortly after the announcement, data solutions provider Lotame released a poll among 200 Singapore-based senior decision-makers in digital media and marketing to further learn their sentiments on the future of cookieless internet.
First off, half, or 55%, said they were happy with Google’s decision to delay citing that they needed “more time to prepare.”
A top concern among digital media professionals is losing revenue amid weakened ad-targeting opportunities, where about 57% of marketers believe in reduced ad-targeting opportunities, with over two-thirds (66%) expecting a 10% to 25% drop in revenues as a result of the loss of third-party cookies. Meanwhile, almost 60% (57%) of publishers anticipate a reduction in the workforce brought by revenue loss.
In adopting new identity solutions, the primary reason for Singapore-based marketers is to support audience targeting (59%), while among publishers, 64% would foremost adopt identity solutions for data privacy.
With the optimal number of ID solutions, 36% of Singapore marketers were open to using any number, while 35% of publishers cited two, with 30% saying three.
“A cookieless future is closer on the horizon and whether or not the industry ‘feels prepared,’ the end result is inevitable,” said Luke Dickens, Lotame’s managing director for ANZ.
Dickens adds, “Digital advertising is changing, and identity solutions will be part of that new future. Addressability and connectivity are at greatest threat in the post-cookie world.”
With a stronger call for privacy, Apple, aside from Google, had digital media players also rethinking their ad strategies with an update on its privacy features earlier this year.
Apple’s new iCloud Private Relay has been designed to protect users’ privacy by ensuring that when browsing the web in Safari, no single party, including Apple itself, can see a user’s identity and the sites he or she is visiting.
The same survey found that 53% of Singapore-based respondents are concerned about their ability to monetize the email channel amid Apple’s new privacy feature, while 46% said they are concerned for the impact on email hash identifiers.
Relatedly, email-based identity solutions (69%) were the most popular choice when asked what types of ID solutions marketers and publishers were planning to test in the next six months to one year. Contextual (44%) was in second place, followed by cohorts (33%) and probabilistic (27%).
The current report ‘Beyond the Cookie: Identity Solution Adoption & Testing Among Marketers and Publishers’ is part two of Lotame’s cookie-focused study, where the pilot study was released in February and examined how organizations are beginning to plan for the phase-out of third-party cookies.