{"id":20085,"date":"2021-08-11T11:43:31","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T10:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/?p=20085"},"modified":"2023-01-16T17:00:27","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T17:00:27","slug":"perfect-customer-journeys-with-contextual-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/perfect-customer-journeys-with-contextual-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Perfect Customer Journeys with Contextual Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

With new regulations such as CCPA and GDPR and the demise of third-party cookies, the digital identity of a consumer is being challenged. There are growing challenges around digital marketing tactics centered on audience profiling, targeting, and user attribution.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new variations of targeting offered by the industry are either replacements of cookie identifiers or solutions based on first-party data, such as contextual targeting. These new pathways are likely to change the way brands interact with consumers through ads and also reshape overall <\/span>customer experiences<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s review these ad tech milestones, what ramifications they bring, and how the ad behaviour might change if the market turns towards contextual targeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are third-party cookies?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Basically, third-party cookies are small individual files that are attached to your browser and follow you around the web. For example, as a user looks for certain treadmill models, their browser will be marked with a cookie. Ads for these particular items will start popping up on other websites, sometimes in an invasive way.<\/span><\/p>\n

First-party cookies are read and written on the same domain; they are used to create a better user experience by remembering login information, abandoned items in the basket, visited pages, etc. On the other hand, third-party cookies are the same files but accessed from other domains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the above-mentioned situation when a user is retargeted by treadmill ads, a cookie is written on the advertiser\u2019s website but accessed on other sites during ad serving, usually, by SSP scripts embedded in the publisher website. Many analytics systems also use third-party cookies for user attribution when measuring website performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

For nearly a decade until now, with third-party cookies as identifiers, audiences could have been profiled and sold to advertisers through programmatic DSPs and trading desks. Apparently, this use also raised privacy concerns around cookie technology as advertising specialists could track user activity from domain to domain.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"1-985\"<\/p>\n

The future of addressability online<\/span><\/h2>\n

For a few years now, users have become more aware of their privacy on the internet and are getting more involved in the process of <\/span>handling their personal data<\/span><\/a>. Therefore, users and industry authorities that act on their behalf insisted on more accountability from websites and ad tech platforms. The ultimate objective here is to keep those agents away from profiling users based on their past browsing behaviours.<\/span><\/p>\n

Responding to this demand, governments in Europe, USA, and other jurisdictions are enforcing more stringent requirements for collecting and processing user data. GDPR and CCPA are only the first steps towards user protection on the Internet. These measures decreed that cookies were personal data and put restrictions on the use of third-party cookies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pushed by regulators as well as public requests, big tech companies put restrictions on digital identifiers and device IDs. Third-party cookies are already gone in Safari and Firefox, while Google announced their demise in Chrome by 2023. Apple also restricted the use of IDFA on iOS devices.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, browsers are restricting other browser signals such as fingerprinting, which can be used for probabilistic user identification. This type of identification uses multiple data points such as IP, browser fonts, language, etc. to assume a visitor is the same person who performed certain actions before. So far, in the nearest future, there will remain no real way to identify users on the web without their explicit permission.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why we should feel optimistic about it<\/span><\/h2>\n

Even given all the above, there remain several possible ways to bypass these challenges, from the industry perspective:<\/span><\/p>\n