In the coming year, consumers and B2B marketers will focus on first-party data strategies to replace their reliance on third-party cookies. These cookies will retire in 2024. At the beginning of January, Google begins testing a new feature which restricts third-party cookies to 1% of its Chrome users. As the year goes on, more users and marketers will scramble to find alternatives.
Google will remain firm on deadlines relating to third-party cookies
“While it has been pushed back in the past, Google will remain firm on its 2024 deadline to remove cookies in Chrome,” said Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, Yahoo’s chief revenue officer. “Advertisers and publishers need to test more cookie alternatives and identity solutions, at scale and quickly.”
She added: “We will see more and more testing of different solutions in the first half of 2024 at all levels to accelerate preparation. Q3 will likely be a wild ride in that way, focused on testing, learning, and then some adoption. In the fourth quarter, we will start to see a convergence towards solutions that are proving effective.
Better AI safeguards and customer data encryption
With the phasing out of third-party cookies, marketers will adopt new customer data collection strategies that include advanced encryption, as well as compliance with the latest privacy regulations.
“In 2024, brands are preparing to face new privacy and ethics challenges with the end of third-party cookies and the advent of new extended language models (LLMs),” said Brian Land, vice president of global business engineering at search technology company Lucidworks. . “This means they will disrupt the way they market and manage consumer data privacy. For example, they will need to find new ways to collect user data and be more transparent about how they collect that data.
He added: “When it comes to managing LLMs, marketers will adopt advanced encryption and secure data storage practices to protect user information. Rest assured, they work hard to get it right, making sure they follow the rules while keeping consumers engaged and satisfied.
Dig Deeper: Why Marketers Should Care About Consumer Privacy
AI Governance and Business Value
Organizations that have experimented with new AI tools for specific marketing functions will look to connect these technologies and create a centralized feedback loop to avoid “genAI multiple personality disorder,” said Assaf Baciu, co-founder and chief operating officer of communications company IA Persado. .
“Companies will begin to deploy a central genAI ‘brain’ to manage the myriad of disparate genAI systems currently scattered across the technology stack, particularly in marketing,” Baciu said. “This master brain will bring orchestration and order to AI model training and decision-making, just as CRM did for email, and CDPs do for data clients.”
By better understanding the role of AI in the organization, marketers will move beyond the testing phase and focus on the value AI brings to the business.
“More CMOs will focus on how genAI can not only be effective, but most effective, driving actions, conversions and ultimately revenue,” Michele Nemschoff, vice president of marketing by Persado. “However, while genAI has become a great co-pilot for marketers, make no mistake: humans and AI are better together. Maximizing collaboration between technology and human teams is the path to performance.
Improved data management for content delivery
The coming year will see organizations using AI to improve their content for more robust customer experiences. This means marketers will need to adopt more comprehensive data management so assets don’t slip through the cracks and more human time is wasted searching for them.
“Without the right metadata or naming conventions as inputs, AI does not have the appropriate resources to provide relevant results,” said Chris Comstock, chief growth officer at marketing data management company Claravine. “As a result, irrelevant, incomplete or inconsistent resources become abundant and data gaps are seen from content creation to measurement. In 2024, regardless of the vertical sector, data consistency will become essential. Brands will finally invest in adopting and implementing AI for optimization and measurement purposes, while realizing the need for a way to manage all input to their AI and LLMs.
Consumers will trade their data for value and personalization
As third-party cookies disappear, marketers will continue to look for more engaging ways to interact with customers. The positive side is that customers will share their data when there is a clear value exchange and the interaction with the brand pays off for them. The main thing is that brands are transparent with users on this exchange.
“A clear majority of consumers want personalized ads and are willing to share the information brands need to make it happen – if the value exchange is right,” said Steve Dunlop, CEO and founder of AMA – A Million Ads, a dynamic creative company for audio. “Today, personalization at scale is more accessible, more affordable and more feasible than ever. »
“As consumers become more concerned about the privacy of their online activities and the data collected about them, the song and dance between providing a personalized experience while keeping their information highly secure and private will increase,” said Yandong Liu, co-founder and chief technology officer. Agent for the conversational marketing company Connectly. “In 2024, continuing to find the balance between providing an individual customer experience while informing consumers about their privacy rights will be vital to brand development and customer experience. »
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Marketers are using more geographic data
Another solution in the post-cookie era will be to rely more on geographic and location-based consumer data, according to Rob Davis, chief marketing officer and president of independent agency NOVUS.
“The principle is simple: Birds of a feather flock together,” Davis said. “By targeting location rather than audience characteristics or anonymized individuals, (geotargeting) provides a targeting opportunity that respects privacy and largely avoids the need for third-party cookies.”
He added: “But while the principle is simple, the execution is not. Few agencies, and even fewer marketers, have the data infrastructure, staff or resources to set up campaigns at the zip code level and be able to optimize them with extreme granularity. For those who do, it will be a competitive advantage.
ABM teams adopt purchasing committee scoring
With more data from increased content and experiences, enterprise B2B marketers will look for more comprehensive ways to target key groups or committees.
B2B marketers will look to go beyond measuring marketing qualified leads (MQLs) related to specific individuals and roles within a company. Instead, ABM teams will use Qualified Buying Committee (QBL) scores that identify individuals and weight them differently in the overall score that determines a committee’s likelihood of buying.
“In addition to the overall buying committee score, sales teams will also receive a portion of the total sum: individual lead scores,” said Karl Van Buren, CEO and co-founder of B2B programmatic platform Audyence. “This gives them context as to who is most likely to advocate for their solution, who has little context about the proposed solution, and who may be a blocker. These insights inform a sales approach in a way that traditional lead scoring models could never enable.
He added: “Based on my engagements with hundreds of enterprise marketers and agency team members, enterprise brands have prepared well for the move away from cookies in 2024. The vast majority have invested in first-party data strategies that have allowed them to reduce their reliance on cookies. .”
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