But, marketers are also giving up on transparency and control in return for greater safety and reliability.
Marketers can no longer rely on user-level identifiers like before because of a slew of global privacy legislation – like GDPR and CCPA – along with consumers’ increasing demand for greater data ownership and ad tech giants making efforts to advance data privacy. Additionally, three major developments, including phasing out of third-part cookies and Apple restricting the use of device identifiers, are further affecting marketer’s ability to target users.
To be relevant in the industry, brands are investing more within “walled gardens” like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Top brands in “Gartner’s Digital IQ: Advertising Benchmarks for 2021” have significantly increased their investments in walled gardens to prepare for the changes as well as to test performance on these growing channels.
Brands use these platforms’ proprietary advertising tools to deliver and measure targeted, brand-safe ads to users with reduced risk of privacy compliance violations or other customer data challenges. But, they rely entirely on how these closed ecosystems measure and interpret advertising performance – challenging to understand and compare campaigns outside their walls.
[3 minute read]