Ogury, a global leader in personified advertising, commissioned IDC to conduct a global survey on 1,000 major brand and media agency executives to get their perspective and understanding of the future of digital advertising in a cookieless world.

Most of the polled executives (60%) agree that user tracking will soon become obsolete. However, more than 40% of respondents are not familiar with targeting technologies that are independent of advertising identifiers.

Identifiers are disappearing, for the best

The survey also found that more than half of advertisers (60%) believe user tracking to be a source of reputational risk for brands. 56% of them think cookies and IDs represent a threat to user privacy, while 60% believe it is only a matter of time before they come to an end.

While some marketing decision-makers might wait for Google to officially phase out third-party cookies on Chrome by the end of 2024, the statistics above are surprisingly low as cookies are already unavailable on Apple's Safari and Firefox, and overall opt-in rates for user tracking are getting increasingly lower as users reject tracking en masse.

Advertisers have limited awareness of alternative options

When asked about “the forthcoming deprecation of third-party cookies and what changes need to be made,” 32% of respondents said they will change the type of AdTech suppliers they are working with. Among them, 64% stated they will increase budgets toward suppliers that do not rely on third-party cookies or any personal data collection. Yet, 41% of all respondents are only moderately, or not at all, familiar with targeting methods other than the ones leveraging identifiers such as cookies.

This represents a huge opportunity for companies providing targeting solutions that don't rely on advertising identifiers. However, these same companies have to evangelize their technologies, which might be complicated to understand since such solutions aren't yet the norm in the industry.

One key concern: scalability

The survey reveals that advertisers are somewhat confident they can reach the right target at scale without identifiers. Indeed, one out of two agency executives and 61% of brands believe that organizations will still be able to reach their audience at scale following the deprecation of third-party cookies.

So, besides not being familiar with the cookieless options available, advertisers already have concerns about how these solutions can help them reach a large share of their target audience, ultimately replacing cookies.

"Clearly, advertisers are not fully seeing yet how huge and impactful the privacy wave will be," continued Geoffroy Martin, CEO at Ogury. "As one of the main players in AdTech, we need to educate marketing decision-makers on which other options are available to them. At Ogury, we've developed an ID-less technology that allows advertisers to reach their intended audience at scale, while not collecting, or using, any personal data. With this unique approach, brands and their media agencies will be equipped to thrive in this challenging new era of advertising."

By MediaBUZZ