COMPLACENT MARKETING
Online marketing is on the fast lane
By Diana Obath
As the year wraps up , it is no news that we have all become accustomed to digital and online vocabulary and the related platforms . For marketing and communications professionals , it is now evident that there is a blurred line between digital media and traditional media driven by convergence which has seen traditional almost fully settle into digital media . The demand by customers to seamlessly consume and move information across different formats and media on demand has further driven the disintegration of traditional and now digital media platforms .
Recent changes by the different digital companies are pointing us to more innovative ways to reach customers and forcing increased innovation in an increasingly challenging advertising space . The increasing concerns around privacy and the ability for customers to optinto different types of media will push brands to take up the newer platforms as they strive to diversify and increase reach with the least effort .
Over the past two years , there has been a notable change in the number of changes that digital and social media platforms have had to make to accommodate both users and creators . The most obvious and recent is the name change by Facebook to Meta , a move the company founder Mark Zuckerburg said was necessary to separate the Facebook brand from the work that the organization is doing towards advancements in the tech space beyond social media . Meta has been working on virtual reality technologies and Metaverse - which is rumored to be the next version of the internet by developers and innovators across the globe .
This is just one change that we have witnessed in the recent past , though all digital and social media platforms seem to be hard at work to increase usage and attain stickability of audiences on their platforms as innovation shapes up rapidly . These moves present a continuous learning gap for today ’ s marketers and emphasize the need to study changing trends to remain relevant in the workplace , relevant to the brands they represent and in tune with the customers that they serve .
A quick look at some of the small and major changes by few of these tech companies is useful to understand where the industry is going and how we need to package our campaigns going into the next few months .
Google last year announced that it will phase out their-party cookies , a move that will impact web publishers , advertisers and marketers and cause
“ For marketing and communications professionals , it is now evident that there is a blurred line between digital media and traditional media driven by convergence which has seen traditional almost fully settle into digital media .” changes in the way digital marketing is executed . It has begun to implement these changes this year and the impact on advertising and marketing campaigns will soon begin to be felt . Third-party cookies are important as they help advertisers trace user activity across the web and helps brands better target their audiences with programmatic advertising such as retargeting and sponsored ads .
The removal of third-party cookies will see Google introduce a cohortbased solution for tracking which tracks a large group of people with similar habits anonymously . This will still allow advertisers to track groups , not individuals while observing growing concerns around data privacy . The challenge with cohort tracking however is that advertisers need a large sample size meaningful enough to deliver accurate personalization , yet still able to deliver on the privacy requirements . Mobile Ad Identifiers may then take the place of cookies in this instance , forcing advertisers to drive better interaction and demand on mobile .
Additionally , advertisers have traditionally depended on digital identifiers such as IP addresses , Smart TV IDs to track customer activity through use of cookies . With the removal of third-party cookies , advertisers now must build their own datasets and make it transparent to users that they are tracking their activity . These datasets can be used with customer data platforms to offer marketers and advertisers information on customer data , preferences , and behavior . This still has to be executed in line with increasing online privacy
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MAL 45 / 21 ISSUE