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Terry Kane, Managing Director Middle East & Africa at Dubai-based The Trade Desk on how advertisers can grow look-alike customers at scale with first-party data and AI-powered tools in a cookie-less future

First-party data is the most powerful asset at a marketeer's disposal to truly understand consumer behaviour online. Looking at browsing habits, purchasing history and preferences of their best customer segments, allows marketeers to create new look-alike segments in order to work towards maximizing relevant advertising reach, both locally and internationally.

Formula to help extend your relevant reach

Targeting look-alike customers with similar characteristics as your existing customers is not a new idea. But some of the digital advertising tools are.

Today, look-alike audience segmentation is powered by artificial intelligence, enabling brands a programmatic execution of more precise targeting which is both cost effective and scalable. The strength of AI-driven processes is the ability to analyse huge amounts of data with a speed and accuracy beyond human capabilities.

For example, we see about 15 million ad opportunities every second and AI can help compare those with what you know about your seed data in order to identify the most relevant ad slots for a successful campaign.

A simple formula for using your first-party data as seeds could be as follows:

• Define your campaign goal, for example brand lift, sales conversion, loyalty, retention, win-back etc.
• Identify which data you have collected about your customers through both owned and paid channels
• Pick the specific customer profiles as seeds for your next campaign
• Match these with third-party data provided by an ad-tech platform, publisher or retailer
• Complement with AI recommendations for building audiences

You have now successfully cloned your ideal customers into new customer segments.

Top tip: Consider unifying your data via an identity-based framework to get a single view of your customer across multiple channels, identities and platforms. A unified first-party strategy can allow you to target and re-target customer on media buying platforms, throughout their journey.

The advertising industry is shaking off the cookie

Marketeers and brands have been preparing for the end of third-party cookies for a while and have focused on developing alternative solutions for look-alike audiences and identity. Ad-tech companies are implementing privacy-conscious alternatives to cookies which can allow you to continue targeting lookalike audiences across the web, apps, connected TV and digital audio.

Many marketeers have overall remained unfazed with Google’s recent announcement about once again delaying the full phaseout of third-party cookies from Chrome, with several saying that this latest delay will not impact their already ongoing transition away from cookies.  In fact, leading media-buying platforms like The Trade Desk don’t significantly rely on third-party cookies any more for delivering campaign success across the vast open internet.

The advertising industry has become identity savvy and is forging ahead without the cookies. Alternative identity solutions have now been developed with consumer privacy in mind. Take the open-source solution Unified ID 2.0 that was initiated by The Trade Desk and is now integrated in certain regions with more than a hundred companies in the digital advertising ecosystem. Advertisers can leverage pseudonymous identifiers from hashed email addresses, allowing them to maintain addressability with a more durable and precise ID across the open internet through a variety of devices and channels, including websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms.

In a cookie-less future, first-party data will rise to meet the marketeer’s needs. Deservedly so, as first-party data will give a better understanding of whom your most valuable customers are, and how to target and engage them in a more precise and cost-efficient way.

Also, this data will be able to supercharge marketing effectiveness when complemented with other strategies such as contextual targeting and alternative identifiers. All which much better control for the user about which data is being used.

In conclusion, the advancements of the advertising industry as a whole plus your first-party data is what can help your digital advertising strategies. So, you can stop worrying about the drawn-out death of the third-party cookie. It won’t matter.