• by Louis Keating , Op-Ed Contributor, July 5, 2024

2025 is only six short months away, and the year Google intends to deprecate cookies. That means marketers should be doubling down on which solutions they will implement to solve for the change, now.

With so many privacy-safe solutions emerging, three strategies stand out: 

- Geographical targeting

- Webpage-focused contextual advertising 

- Identity partners (especially for retail targeting)

Geographical Targeting Explained

With privacy taking center stage, geo audiences will become an essential part of media strategy -- especially for clients working in tightly controlled, global environments. 

Geographical Targeting acts as a relevance engine by creating cohorts of individuals for targeting, in a privacy-compliant way.

Individuals in these cohorts share interests, locations and sometimes moments in time across display media, CTV, social, mobile, DOOH, and audio.

Geo-Targeting Delivers Sustainable Value in a Privacy-Conscious World

Reduced costs: By targeting your ads to a specific geographic location paired with interest, demographic, household, and behavioral data plus time-based signals from social and search, you can reduce costs by only paying for impressions in high-value locations from people interested in your product or service. 

Extending reach: When a specific audience is required, traditional addressable audiences -- although very targeted -- can be limited in volume. A geographical overlay can help extend the reach to those people who are most likely to be interested.

Contextual Advertising Explained

Contextual advertising targets consumers based on the content and semantics of the web pages they are visiting. This type of advertising enables brands to reach consumers who are interested in their products or services, resulting in effective and efficient advertising campaigns. 

Contextual advertising works by analyzing the content of web pages in real-time to identify relevant keywords and topics.

Technological advancements in AI, large language models, and image recognition software will provide additional context to what an individual is reading or seeing, creating a more timely and direct route for ad placement.

The information gathered from the analysis conducted is used to target ads to users who are interested in those topics. 

The Power of Contextual Advertising

Relevancy: Contextual advertising is more relevant to users than traditional advertising, so it can lead to higher click-through rates, conversions, and ROAS (return on ad spend). 

Privacy-friendly: Contextual advertising does not collect or store any personal data from users, making it a safe and privacy-friendly way to reach your target audience. 

Cost-effective: Contextual advertising is often more cost-effective than traditional advertising, as it allows brands to target their ads more precisely, and thus increases ROI. 

The Right Identity Partner Can Go a Long Way

Stepping back from specific privacy-conscious targeting solutions, it is important to examine the value of identity partners and their potential impact on finding relevant audiences -- especially in the retail space.

Once third-party cookies are removed, marketers will achieve more when they target "known" consumers -- for example, consumers logged in to a publisher’s site. Having a reputable identity partner that has made integrations with such sites will be key in navigating this change.

Interoperability is critical here -- marketers should look for an identity partner that can operate within other providers’ frameworks as multiple graphs will maximize reach.

Identity partners will be especially important in the retail space as we shift to a “known” online state. Most if not all retailers already require a login, naturally positioning them in the ideal walled space to capture this data.

Retail media networks are one of the fastest-growing advertising channels, and finding an agency partner that can unlock walled gardens and quickly translate retail data to build strategic audiences and target them will be key in the post-cookie world. 

What Does the Future Hold for Marketers in a Cookie-less World?

It’s time to innovate, explore, and get ahead of the increasingly complex consumer advertising space. 

With opportunities to target potential customers geographically, advertise strategically to interested marketers via contextual advertising, and work alongside an Identity Partner to access critical data, marketers can lay the foundation for a future focused on cost-effective advertising success.