Are Your Media Partners Ignoring ID Deprecation? Find Out Before They Hurt Your Business
If your head is spinning from all the headlines about ID deprecation, you’re not the only one. Third-party cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) have been in the line of fire for a while now, but it’s not easy to plan ahead when Apple and Facebook continue to feud over IDFA, or when Google unexpectedly gives cookies two more years to grow stale.
What should you do? Pretend it’s all fine and wait until everything is sorted out? Do you even know how much you’re currently relying on those soon-to-be-gone forms of ID to activate your marketing campaigns, measure their performance, and personalize how you interact with your customers?
We think you need to know, and you need to know now. Recent iOS version changes have already thrown a wrench into marketers’ ad tracking capabilities, and Google's two-year reprieve for third-party cookies will go by in the blink of an eye. You need to review all your media integrations and partnerships before it’s too late, and assess what impact ID deprecation will have on each of those platforms.
Now is the time to make all the necessary adjustments.
Two steps to assess the impact of ID deprecation
There are two steps that you should take to assess the impact that ID deprecation will have on your marketing performance. The first step is to size up how much of your total media investments is currently going to channels that rely on perishable IDs (like cookies and device IDs) for key use cases (like targeting, measurement, or ad personalization).
We just launched an easy-to-use calculator for you to get a quick idea of where you stand: Use it now and see for yourself. What’s your score? If you rely heavily on programmatic buying, you’re likely to get a low score and a warning that your media investments are seriously at risk.
But that preliminary score doesn’t tell the whole story. Some of your media measurement and syndication partners might have a plan in place to replace cookies and MAIDs when the time comes, while others might be heading for the cliff. You need to do a full audit of every partner, platform, and publisher across your marketing mix, and shift your investments to those that will help you mitigate the impact of ID deprecation.
That second step is complicated and time-consuming, but it’s absolutely necessary. One of our clients realized that more than 50% of their addressable media was going to a single platform with no solution in the works to replace cookies in the near future. They were relying on that media partner for not just activation, but measurement and personalization as well, putting their business at risk across multiple use cases. The audit allowed them to shift spending to a more progressive platform in their mix, and with a much better match rate to boot.
If you had to pick between a platform with a 30% match rate and no clear post-cookie future, and another with an 80% match rate and a clear post-cookie roadmap, which would you choose?
Exactly. But you can’t make those decisions if you don’t have the data.
Get the data you need to future-proof your media partnerships
Last year, we launched a complete omnichannel data connectivity platform, Fabrick™, and as part of that development, we deployed a suite of integrations (such as direct identity-based, programmatic, contextual, cohorts, and clean rooms) to help addressable media advertisers and publishers transition away from cookies and MAIDs. Since then, we’ve worked with SSPs, DSPs, ad serving, data syndication, marketing technology vendors, and over 250 publishers to integrate their offerings with the Fabrick platform and develop a roadmap for clients eager to future-proof their addressable marketing investments.
Today, we can tell our clients if the syndication and measurement platforms they rely on are already fully integrated into the Fabrick ecosystem, if that work is in progress, or if it’s yet to begin. When they combine that information with other important data points—like their spend or volume for each partner, what use cases are involved, or what their match rates are—they can make educated decisions on what partnerships to renew or not.
We call this whole process a Fabrick Impact Assessment. It’s not limited to programmatic either: It covers a wide array of other channels, platforms, and formats including retail, display, mobile, social media, search, connected and linear television, direct mail, email, and out-of-home advertising. And it includes a thorough impact analysis of our clients' websites and mobile app activity as well. We do it for our clients on a regular basis to help them assess their vulnerability to ID deprecation and help them prepare for the future of media, and we can do it for you too.
Don’t think you’re immune to the impact of ID deprecation, or that Google will take care of all your post-cookie measurement and syndication needs via Campaign Manager 360. We’ve done dozens of Fabrick Impact Assessments already across a wide range of industries, and it’s been an eye-opener for our clients who found that they could take immediate measures to re-balance their media partnerships, and start activating up to 80% of their media without third-party cookies or device IDs today—not in 2023.
Take action now: Let us show you how to get ahead of the curve.
