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Let’s explore a different niche!

Digital marketing is an intriguing and upcoming field in this era. It’s all about people, perspectives, and of course, promotion. A paramount and big aspect of this subject is advertising.

Talking about ads you see on various websites, they all work by the grace of cookies. I am sure you’ve heard of them. First-party cookies are set on a website by a publisher’s web server and can be deleted or blocked by the user. They collect basic data to provide good user experience, like language settings. Third-party cookies are created by domains that are not on the website you visit and are used to collect behavioral information, location, device type, etc. Fun fact- while the main purpose of these cookies is for programmatic advertising now, the idea originally was not related to advertising at all. 

In simple words, third-party cookies are what ‘violate user privacy’. It is due to these that you can see your shopping cart on various websites. Online advertisements mainly function because of third-party cookies, they are an integral part of this job. Without them, relevant and tailored ads are a difficult possibility. 

Yet, with the advent of user privacy concerns, these will be abandoned soon enough. There are ever-growing issues about the collection of data without a user’s consent and knowledge. This will be a game-changer for the advertisement industry.

There might be a possibility to find opportunity amidst the chaos. Various solutions are being discussed about cookie-less advertising and marketing. If you want to skip ads altogether, browsers like Brave are doing a satisfactory job. They block almost all cookies, and you don’t get the much annoying repeated advertisements. Apple Safari and Mozilla are already on board.

Similarly, Google forwarded a proposal for the post-cookie world, christening it as the  ‘Privacy Sandbox’. It aims to make user experience with ads hassle-free and productive. Just to be clear, they are not eliminating them, they are trying to figure out ways to maintain user privacy and still provide tailored ads. 

After a lot of technical research and jargon, I came across some solutions that were put forward. Here is a short, summarized version of the most repeated ones, via web.dev.

• First-party data: Shows ads that are relevant to data and topics a person has told a website they have an interest in or content a person has looked at previously on the current website.

• Interest-based: Select ads based on a user’s browsing history. For example, ‘Show this as to users whose browsing behavior indicates they might be interested in sports’.

• Contextual: Choose where to display ads based on on-site content. For example, ‘Put this ad next to articles about sports’.

• Remarketing: Advertise to people who’ve already visited your site, while they are not on your site. For example, ‘Show this ad for discount shoes to people who visited your store and left items in their shopping cart’. 

These are some of the many ways to work around cookie-less marketing that might be seen soon. Agencies and firms have started investing in the same. 

This is surely a challenge, but that’s how industries build, innovate, and evolve. 

I certainly look forward to viewing fewer ads on this platform. 

That’s it for today, folks- thank you for reading! Comment and let me know if you’d be interested in more posts about marketing.

Keep the innovative vibes flowing, 

Pranjali Jain