From CMO to Agency Trader: How an Identifier-Free World Will Impact Us All

It’s the end of advertising as we know it, and marketers are yawning. Personally, I can’t blame you if your eyes glaze over every time you see another story about third-party cookie deprecation, or the demise of mobile ad IDs (MAIDs). The doom and gloom crowd has been banging the drum so loud and for so long on this narrative that we can’t hear ourselves think.

But we do need to think about the future, because as we enter an identifier-free world, our jobs will change, and we need to be ready. With Apple’s ATT framework already in place, Google’s deprecation of the Android ID will reduce the overall percentage of mobile phones transmitting consented cross-app identifiers to somewhere between 8-14 percent — at a time when consumers spend up to five hours per day on their smartphones.

Only Google knows when this will happen, yet everyone understands — or should understand — that an immediate signal loss of that magnitude will upend campaign targeting across the entire ecosystem.

But rather than being consumed by fear, or sticking our proverbial heads in the sand, CMOs must focus their teams on what they do best: Test and learn. Here’s how four different marketing roles should be thinking about the challenges ahead and some immediate actions to take:

Marketing VPs

For Marketing VPs, the goal in an identifier-free ad ecosystem is to engage media partners with addressability solutions that can be stitched together in a meaningful, consistent way, and measured on an apples-to-apples basis. While those capabilities are currently under construction, the greatest impending need is to develop a holistic view and a comprehensive understanding of how each emergent solution interprets and defines the concept of “audience,” because that ultimately puts Marketing VPs in a position where they’re comfortable reaching the same intent across channels. In other words, marketing leaders need to be obsessed with audience definition and verification.

Along the same lines, Marketing VPs will need to think holistically about how their media partners can empower them to deliver frequency capping, reach measurement, and comparable ROI reporting across the board.

Media Strategists / Planners

Some media strategists are looking to machine learning to supplement and replace identity signal loss. While there’s merit to that idea, there’s also a hurdle that could be insurmountable for some advertisers because there might not be enough quality data available to do meaningful targeting, or enough budget runway for small campaigns or highly specific targeting goals to let the machines do their magic. One alternative is to lean into contextual, but in order to make contextual work, media strategists will need to test and learn new bidding strategies.

Unlike traditional ID-based targeting, contextual advertising treats every user of an app or visitor to a URL the same. On the surface, that means more waste for everyone on the buy-side. Established brands can absorb a lot of waste if it means reaching their target audiences, but challenger brands will no longer have the luxury of leveraging complex bidding strategies to level the playing field. Of course, bidding strategies don’t exist in a vacuum, so media strategists everywhere will need to develop new frameworks and bidding strategies for an ecosystem where some players will be able to pay a premium for inventory that’s in high demand.

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Agency Traders

Just like media strategists, agency traders will also have to test and learn in order to develop new bidding strategies. But before agency traders reimagine their bidding strategies, they’ll need to reconsider audiences on a channel-by-channel basis. That is, agency traders will need to determine how audiences are defined inside each channel, as well as the mechanisms for optimization that are specific to those channels.

To a degree, agency traders are already testing and learning on this front because identity signal loss is happening right now. But more often than not, testing and learning at this stage results in lasering in on channels with individual identity signals and abandoning those without, rather than experimenting with emerging tactics to establish benchmarks for performance in channels devoid of deterministic identity. While day-to-day adaptation is encouraging, it’s critical for agency traders to zoom out and think about their evolving tactics in systemic terms. Otherwise, they’ll spend the next few years creating an incoherent patchwork of workarounds.

Performance Marketers

The key question for performance marketers is determining what signals are available for attribution. At the moment, many performance marketers rely on device fingerprinting to provide those attribution signals as deterministic identity goes away. But that’s a risky proposition based on recent history at Apple and Google. If the OS platforms actually enforce what has thus far been more of perfunctory prohibition on use of IP address and other HTTP header signals, these marketers will find themselves high and dry. A better course for performance marketers is to dig into the log-level reporting they currently get and begin testing and learning new attribution strategies from there.

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Consumers (Everyone)

No matter what you do in the marketing ecosystem, your work informs the consumer experience. As identity signals significantly shrink, the consumer experience is likely to deteriorate. That’ll show up in multiple forms — from poorly targeted ads to seeing the same ad over and over again. As marketers, we can’t ignore the growing pains that accompany change. In fact, it’s our job to address change quickly and systemically. After all, bringing consumers the very best digital experiences sits at the core of our business.