Marketing in a post cookie world 🍪

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Welcome to "note to self" #5 focused on marketing in web3 💻

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Today we're discussing marketing in a post-cookie world. Let's dig in 🍽

Third-party tracking - an overview

Third-party tracking is utilised by third-party advertisers to monitor user’s web surfing habits and track their online activity. The majority of the ad ecosystem is underpinned by the use of cookies and big tech companies' business models lie within this ad ecosystem. As the internet evolves data privacy is becoming harder, tracking is becoming harder and ad costs are becoming higher.

This means that personalisation of content and targeting advertising to individuals may pivot. Marketing budgets will decrease spending on paid ads as they become less effective and be forced to concentrate on individual and audience engagement.

This week we saw Instagram fined €405 million for breaches of children’s privacy. Although not directly related to third-party tracking, control of consumer personal information is still an issue. Data privacy has become a more serious topic with browsers like Chrome announcing measures to restrict their use of cookies. Google has set a delayed date of 2025 for cookie depreciation on chrome. The reason for their delay was the need for further testing on their privacy sandbox initiative, but both Safari and Firefox have introduced third-party cookie blocking. Chrome just has 65% of the browser market share.

Marketing in a post-cookie world.

These are a number of ways marketing in the future may prevail without the existence of granular third-party tracking by large entities. There are of course further web3 native approaches such as community-led growth and incentivized growth ( like Sweat ) as core aspects of web3 marketing, but I want to give a more detailed view of these methods in upcoming newsletters.

1. First-party data

First-party data is data that your company owns and collects directly from your audience. Newsletters, for example, are one way of collecting first-party data, where email data might be gathered. Marketers will want to own their own first-party data and use it for media activation. An in-house data model may be created. Understanding your audience and their behaviours will rely on building first-party relationships with your customers, as third-party tracking disappears.

Audience targeting solutions activated by first-party data and audience modelling will become more and more important in order to reach target markets, however, many advertisers don’t have sufficient first-party data and will need to create scalable data collection strategies to obtain accurate information about audiences.

2. Consumer relationships

Consumer touchpoints will no longer be heavily focused on using paid advertising like ads and search to target consumers through display ads or SEM ( search engine marketing ).

With this change, making sure to give more than you actually take is a concept I believe marketers should hold in their playbooks. For example, giving could be a great piece of content or something that adds true value to your audience, whereas taking, on the other hand, could be an ad display, which actually interrupts what you’re doing.

To create a more private, transparent, and trustworthy internet for all, businesses can use this to their advantage and nurture one on one relationships and deliver personalized messaging which becomes a more critical strategy facing the world with fewer cookies. The ruling principle here should be to create and sustain consumer relationships that yield a value exchange while protecting the privacy of users.

3. Data partnerships and second-party data

Forming partnerships can allow companies to maximise the value of their data, in order to exchange data. Data partnerships like this are generally formed between two trusted partners with complementary interests to share audience insights that are mutually beneficial.

Sharing personal information, including identity, is limited due to data privacy laws, which means sharing data may be in the form of aggregated categories or segments, not personal information. Targeting is done anonymously, where personally identifiable information is not exposed.

Partnering with others to obtain data gives you information from a different lens. Since that company's data is aligned with your goals you may find new trends and patterns about your audience not seen in first-party data, meaning customers' interests and needs you didn't realise existed are now identified.

In other news: 📰

-> Binance to rename all stablecoin holdings to BUSD

-> Ethereum Devs Dismiss Early Hiccups as Bellatrix Kicks Off the Merge

-> Blog/Pod/Video of the week: Marketing against the grain: Web3, customer acquisition, and value props.

Spotlight💡: BlocksocDAO

What: BlockSocDAO is the bridge between students globally and the web3 ecosystem.

Why: BlocksocDAO wants students globally to join forces through a DAO infrastructure where they can upskill, build on-chain portfolios and be funnelled into web3 jobs and start-ups.

Check them out!

Next time: ⏭️

Next week I will discuss incentives for web3 growth and incentivized marketing.

Have a great weekend!

Harry Arkwright