We recently partnered with Choozle, a programmatic advertising platform, to discuss the phase-out of the third-party cookie.

To dig deeper into that conversation, we sat down with Kendra Rizzo, VP of Advertising Technology, to get her take on what marketers can do now to advertise effectively in the future.

First things first: Describe what Choozle is, how it works, and how it fits into the advertising ecosystem.

Choozle provides a digital advertising software that brings together multiple digital advertising tools, a demand-side platform, a data management platform, and smart tag management into a single platform. Designed for advertising agencies and marketing departments, Choozle strives to break down digital advertising complexity.

Our customers come to us as a means to execute programmatic advertising campaigns across display, video, mobile, and other mediums. This would put us in the demand-side of the entire advertising ecosystem. Like many different systems, Choozle works to integrate with various tools and platforms across the whole advertising ecosystem.

At a high level, how is the advertising industry thinking about attribution right now? What changes are on the horizon, and how will it impact the industry as a whole? 

Attribution isn’t a new problem facing the advertising industry. From the beginning, marketers bought into the idea that they could seamlessly track users across the entire buying process to identify the magic sequence of ads and touchpoints that unlock the customer conversion. The goal is to use attribution so you can make better decisions about spending and optimization. However, in practice, it is much harder to do. 

On a basic level, attribution refers to the process of tracking the referral sources of a particular user’s conversion. There are many ways to track attribution, but they all have in common that they use third-party cookies to signal a user’s conversion. 

How could third-party cookie changes end up affecting advertisers and consumers, respectively, for the better and worse?

The third-party cookie changes that Google and many other browsers are making are just reflections of what’s happening more broadly in our society and the pressures consumers are putting on these providers. Realistically, the status quo could not continue. The advertising industry had to make some changes. 

While there will be a short-term disruption for advertisers, I see this as an opportunity. The move away from cookies, which are an annoyance to most users, to a system that values user privacy and trusted marketing relationships. On top of that, the Privacy Sandbox will receive anonymized signals to allow for aggregated conversion data reporting. We should start to see users more aware of advertisers and brands that value their privacy, leading to better engagement. 

How will the coming attribution changes affect Choozle? How is your platform adapting from a technical standpoint?

There is still a lot to be uncovered on how the third-party cookie changes will impact Choozle, let alone the entire digital advertising ecosystem. 

Advertisers should have some confidence in the direction of where things are going. I am thrilled to see the World Wide Web Consortium involvement in the Privacy Sandbox and the IAB’s effort on creating a Unified ID solution framework. What marketers need most are privacy standardization across browsers and unified identifiers. While there are still unanswered questions around the technical implications, this effort could bring us all a step closer in that direction.

When it comes to your clients, what are their main concerns when they hear about third-party cookie changes? 

There is a lot of fear surrounding the third-party cookie changes. But with any change that the advertising industry has faced, we’ve adapted to it. 

Our customers are predominantly concerned with audience targeting. As the third-party cookies get disabled, data targeting like using third-party data providers will potentially decrease. However, we have been seeing the reliance on third-party data decrease over the last year as CCPA went into effect. While we see a fair amount of our customers leverage first-party data, marketers might turn to targeting solutions that don’t require the use of cookies. This include keyword targeting, site targeting, and device id targeting. 

What type of behavior do you see customers adopting out of fear? (And is there reason to be concerned?)

Our customers have already been adopting the use of first-party data when GDPR and CCPA went into effect. While we might see a decrease in reach with first-party data after the death of the third-party cookie. Once the industry and Choozle decide on a universal ID this will be the most effective strategy. Contextual keywords and targeting will be adopted during the transition much like it was in the EU after GDPR.

What can marketers do now to manage the change proactively?

Marketers need to get VERY close to their privacy policy, tag management, and data collection tools. To proactively manage the changes coming to third-party cookies, marketers should be aware of the data they collect and use throughout their marketing stack. 

It is far easier to manage change if you have all your ducks in order beforehand. 

Kendra Rizzo is the VP of Advertising Technology at Choozle – Easy Digital Advertising®. She got her start as a web developer but quickly transitioned the technical side of marketing and advertising technology. Kendra leads the marketplace quality and technical support teams which helps ensure Choozle supports universal marketplace standards to ensure we continue to scale the digital advertising ecosystem.

*Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.