In the fast-paced world of advertising, the saying “Good things come to those who wait” couldn’t be further from the truth. In an era where technology evolves rapidly, and consumer behavior constantly shifts, advertisers clinging to outdated and monotonous campaign strategies may find themselves drifting away from valuable business opportunities.

Discover the Trends Taking Over in 2024

As we step into 2024, it becomes imperative for advertisers to discern and leverage key trends to maintain a competitive edge in this dynamic arena.

Brace yourself for the cookie countdown

The global digital advertising market was valued at $601.8 billion in 2023, with media ads accounting for 67.1% of overall expenditure. Clearly, digital advertising is a lucrative industry, and it’s no surprise that more companies are finding ways to capitalize on this trend. However, as more companies seek to tap into this thriving trend, it’s essential to address the impending challenge of cookie deprecation and its potential impact on advertisers and digital advertising revenue.

Google has outlined its plan to phase out third-party cookies entirely by the conclusion of 2024, and efforts are already underway to implement this transition. The initial measure involves the introduction of Privacy Sandbox Tracking Protection, which will be experienced by 1% of Chrome users globally. This feature aims to restrict cross-site tracking by default.

Focus will be more on Personalization and Hyper-Targeting

“One-size-fits-all” approach won’t be effective anymore. With abundance of information and choices consumers today expect to be catered with relevant ads, they want brands to directly speak to them based on their interests, needs and preferences.

70% of consumers expect personalization and 56% agreed that personalized experience motivates them to become a repeat customer. (Source)

From a business point of view, personalisation helped 77% of businesses increase their market share. This form of marketing has increased conversions nearly 50% for brands. (Source)

Brands that don’t invest in understanding their audience and delivering tailored content are at the risk of losing customer engagement.

Video Content Dominance

Video content will continue to dominate the existing ad formats, as billions of viewers tune in. According to stats, 2023 had seen a 23% surge in internet traffic volume globally, escalating usage of streaming videos. (source)

But, advertisers need to be mindful of the video length, as consumer attention span and patience is getting shorter. More than 25% of adults close a video after 10 seconds and approximately 50% of the viewers close it after 20 seconds. (source)

Brands should focus on creating high-quality and engaging video content for platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. This trend is especially important as attention spans decrease, and visual storytelling becomes more critical.

Interactive Content

Since video content is gaining popularity advertisers need to advance their video advertising strategies. From the traditional video ads there is going to be an upgrade to dynamic interactive video ads.

To drive more engagement and conversion, advertisers should incline towards dynamic video ads as a result they have noted significant growth in their online sales.

Interactive content, such as polls, quizzes, and augmented reality experiences, not only captures attention but also provides a more immersive brand experience.

Among the interactive elements, shoppable TV ads have proven to be highly effective for cutting through the noise and boosting customer engagement due to their interactive nature. According to a survey, Shoppable ads have 55% ad recall and 50% interacting rate.

Role of Generative AI

Generative AI can process large amounts of data and generate valuable insights that can inform strategic decisions in campaign planning. Additionally, AI algorithms can analyze diverse datasets to identify and create new audience segments. Using these insights, advertisers can tailor their campaigns to specific demographics, ensuring more targeted and effective advertising.

Advertisers are using predictive analytics to analyze historical data and gain insights into user behavior, enabling them to optimize their campaigns further.

Conclusion

The advertising industry heavily relies on AI for campaign planning, execution, and optimization. Generative AI is changing the game by actively participating in the process. To achieve maximum success, brands should stay up-to-date with the latest trends in advertising and incorporate generative AI into their campaigns. This will provide advertisers with unparalleled levels of data analysis, audience segmentation, and dynamic content creation, leading to more efficient and personalized targeted advertising that can significantly boost the impact of campaigns. In a constantly evolving landscape, innovation is crucial to maintain growth and market dominance. Brands that embrace the potential of generative AI and adapt their strategies accordingly can exceed the expectations of the ever-changing consumer base. This will ensure a prosperous future in the dynamic world of advertising.

Crafters is here to transform traditional ads into highly advanced interactive ads with its cutting-edge dynamic video optimization. 

With global ad spending expected to exceed $295 billion by 2026, video advertising has become an immensely popular method to connect with audiences online.

With over 2 billion active users worldwide, YouTube stands as the leading video advertising platform, hands down.

Unfortunately, engaging with users through video advertising on the open web is not as straightforward and convenient as it is with YouTube videos.

Read on to discover why video advertising on the open web is lagging behind and explore various methods that can help users unlock the full potential of video advertising across the web.

Factors Hindering Video Ad Promotion on the Open Web

Below are the reasons for hesitation in promoting video ads on the open web versus YouTube and other social media platforms:

1. Low Viewability

Video ads on the open web are often skipped or muted, resulting in low viewability rates. According to a study by IAB, the average viewability rate for video ads on the open web is only 58%. In contrast, the average viewability rate for video ads on YouTube is 95%.

2. Poor Targeting

Video ads on the open web lack precise targeting options because they rely on programmatic advertising based on website content and user browsing history which reduces advertiser control.

3. Lack of Engagement

Video ads on social media platforms are more engaging than those on the open web because they play uninterrupted.

Here are the top three reasons that have kept video advertising on the open web in the backseat. However, by modifying our advertising methods and incorporating advanced techniques such as dynamic video optimization, advertisers can witness significant improvements in their campaigns.

But, first, let’s understand DVO.

What is Dynamic Video Optimization?

Dynamic Video Optimization (DVO) is an innovative programmatic advertising approach that uses data-driven insights to create personalized video ads.

By analyzing user data, including interests, demographics, and browsing history, DVO enables advertisers to customize video content for each viewer.

Real-time analytics and contextual information are leveraged to tailor the ads based on the current context.

This personalized approach enhances the ad experience, increasing the likelihood of capturing viewers’ attention and driving conversions.

Consequently, DVO delivers relevant and engaging video content that resonates with individual viewers, maximizing the effectiveness of video advertising campaigns.

Why Should Advertisers Use Dynamic Video Optimization?

1. Advanced Targeting Capabilities

DVO offers advanced targeting capabilities, allowing advertisers to reach their desired audience with precision. Delivering video ads to the most relevant viewers increases the chances of engagement and conversions.

2. Enhanced User Experience

DVO enables advertisers to create immersive and interactive video ad experiences. By incorporating features such as shoppable touchpoints, users can seamlessly explore and purchase products or services directly from the video. This improves the user experience by eliminating the need for multiple clicks and streamlining the path to purchase.

3. Data-Driven Insights

DVO provides valuable data and insights that can inform advertisers’ future strategies. By tracking user interactions, engagement metrics, and conversion data, advertisers can gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s preferences and behaviors. These insights can then be used to optimize future video ad campaigns for better results.

4. Measurable Results

With DVO, advertisers have access to detailed analytics and performance metrics. This allows them to track the effectiveness of their video ads in real time, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), and make data-driven decisions to improve campaign performance. Advertisers can easily monitor CTRs, view rates, conversions, and other relevant metrics to evaluate the success of their advertising efforts.

5. Dynamic Storytelling

DVO enables advertisers to tell compelling stories through video ads. By leveraging dynamic content insertion and personalization techniques, advertisers can tailor their messages based on individual viewer characteristics, interests, or behaviors. This approach creates a more engaging and memorable experience for viewers, leading to higher brand recall and affinity.

6. Omnichannel Reach

DVO allows advertisers to reach their target audience across multiple platforms and devices. Whether it’s mobile, desktop, social media, or connected TVs, advertisers can deliver their video ads seamlessly across various channels, ensuring maximum reach and visibility.

Enhance Your Video Creatives with Silverpush’s Crafters

Crafters is Silverpush’s highly advanced dynamic video optimization technology. It is a solution for creating and delivering personalized video ads to users based on a variety of data sources.

We all know Videos are the most engaging Ad Format. But by infusing AI and unique Interactivity features, Crafters can help brands in leveraging Video Ads on the Open Web, like never before!

Crafters will help you improve the performance of video advertising campaigns by adding a layer of contextual creativity that will drive better business outcomes.

Here are some additional tips for using DVO effectively:

1. Use the Right Data

The data you use to create your DVO campaigns is critical to their success. Make sure you’re using high-quality data that is relevant to your target audience.

2. Test Different Variations

Once you’ve created your DVO campaigns, test different variations to see what works best for your audience. This will help you optimize your campaigns for maximum results.

3. Track your Results

It’s important to track the results of your DVO campaigns so you can see what’s working and what’s not. This will help you make adjustments to your campaigns to improve your results.

Importance of Crafters: Elevate your Performance and Engagement on Video Ads

1. Advertisers

Our next-gen video optimization technology solves the problem of ads being ignored by audiences. By incorporating an interactive feature into traditional video ads, it has the potential to generate users’ curiosity and encourage them to engage with the ad. This leads to improved performance metrics such as click-through rates, lead generation, and video view-through rates.

2. Users

Users will not only view the video ad but will have various formats to interact with the ad as per their interest, ad type, and various options to redirect to the desired page.

Conclusion

With the advertising world growing at a fast rate, it’s important to keep pace. Traditional video ads fail to engage users or boost user engagement. That’s why Silverpush has developed an advanced solution delivering a staggering 2X increase in Click-Through Rates (CTRs) and an impressive uplift of nearly 60% in Video Completion Rates (VTRs) solving the problems of video advertising on the open web. Take a step towards boosting your ad performance and capturing audience attention by filling out the form on the right. Our team of experts will be in touch with you shortly to provide more insights into our groundbreaking technology.

Let’s face the truth: THIRD-PARTY COOKIES ARE LONG GONE!

Advertisers need to drastically shift from conventional targeting methods (requiring audience data) to privacy-focused strategies without compromising on delivering relevant ads.

Traditional targeting methods relied on cookies to reach targeted audiences by building a detailed profile of their online activity.

Growing data privacy concerns and the implementation of regulations like CCPA and GDPR raise the dilemma – how to balance between delivering personalized and relevant ads while respecting user privacy?

Enters Mirrors Generative AI, the next-gen contextual planning tool capable of discovering audiences without cookies and reaching them precisely in contextually relevant moments. The highly advanced tool was recently launched by Silverpush at its Cannes Lions 2023 debut.

Amplifying Relevance and Reach with Generative AI-Powered Contextual Advertising

Mirrors, the flagship product of Silverpush, has recently integrated Generative AI into its contextual advertising technology to help brands reconnect with their untapped audiences.

It is a revolution that will boost the ever-present contextual intelligence by discovering newer audience personas without any human bias, guesswork, or stereotypes of the past.

By leveraging its predictive AI technology, Mirrors goes beyond the basics and delves deep into the content consumption habits of the target audience.

Utilizing advanced generative AI technology, Mirrors carefully analyzes videos and identifies key contexts in  webpages, surveys, and a wide range of content on the open web, examining each word with precision.

This enables Mirrors to uncover patterns, decipher meaning, and extract valuable insights that surpass surface-level understanding.

Challenges Faced by Advertisers in Finding Contexts Manually

To maximize engagement, advertisers aim to target diverse audience personas based on their specific interests, timing, and context. However, relying on manual context-building methods has certain limitations.

1. Scale and Complexity: Manually creating context triggers for a large volume of content can be a time-consuming and complex task. Advertisers may struggle to keep up with the constantly evolving content landscape and the need to identify and update relevant triggers across various platforms and channels.

2. Subjectivity and Bias: Manual context trigger creation involves human judgment, which can introduce subjectivity and bias. Advertisers may have different interpretations of content, resulting in inconsistent or inaccurate context triggers that may not align with the intended audience or message.

3. Limited Contextual Understanding: Fully comprehending the context of every piece of content manually can be challenging. Advertisers may miss subtle nuances, references, or trends that could impact the appropriateness of ad placement.

4. Resource Intensity: Creating and managing manual context triggers requires dedicated resources, including skilled personnel, time, and effort. Advertisers may face limitations in terms of available resources, hindering their ability to effectively build and maintain comprehensive sets of context triggers.

5. Timeliness and Real-time Updates: Content evolves rapidly, and new trends and topics emerge regularly. Advertisers may struggle to keep their manual context triggers up to date, leading to potential misalignment between ads and current content relevance.

6. Scalability and Adaptability: As advertising campaigns scale and expand across different platforms and channels, managing manual context triggers becomes more challenging. Advertisers may find it difficult to adapt their triggers to new formats, channels, or emerging content types.

Eliminating Human Bias and Automating Context Discovery

The real power of Mirrors Generative AI lies in its ability to seamlessly integrate AI as a co-pilot to human intelligence. The advanced technology builds a comprehensive context list, well aligned with the audience’s personas and their direct and alternate interests. This enables advertisers to reach untapped/overlooked yet relevant audiences, resulting in enhancing incremental reach.

Why Plan Your Next Campaign With Mirrors Generative AI?

1. Cookieless Audience Discovery: The contextual planning tool will enable advertisers to identify contextually relevant audiences without relying on third-party cookies.

2. Scale without Compromise: Better contextual relevance leads to improved audience understanding, which can often be overlooked. By tapping into these overlooked audiences, advertisers can enhance their reach and engagement.

3. Understand Multicultural Audience: Mirrors Generative AI uses diverse datasets to assess performance across races and cultures. Then, analyzing metrics and understanding the emotional impact, bias, inclusion, and purchasing intent. This generates audience personas and passion points, offering advertisers valuable insights for informed decision-making.

4. Create Highly Customized Campaigns: Utilizing Mirrors Generative AI offers the opportunity to go beyond pre-defined taxonomies and gain unparalleled flexibility in creating highly customized campaigns.

Ready to Experience 3X Audience Expansion with Mirrors Generative AI?

It’s your time to broaden your audience reach with Mirrors Generative. To know how our advanced tool can boost your ROI fill and widen your reach with precision out the form on the right.

Hold on to your advertising hats, because big cookieless changes are coming to the digital ad landscape!

Many of us have experienced being followed across various social media platforms and other websites. And being given persistent personalized reminders to purchase a product after searching for it online.

What’s the reason behind it, ever given it a thought?

We all leave behind traces of data regarding our online activities, including the websites we visit and the searches we make.

Advertisers use this information to deliver personalized ads through a process called online behavioral advertising.

Basically, it’s done through the use of cookies, which are small files that are stored on our device when we visit a website.

Undoubtedly, cookies have helped fuel a multi-billion dollar online advertising industry. According to data, this well-worn digital tool has helped build digital advertising into a highly efficient $350 billion market.

But now as we witness the dawn of third-party cookies, what’s the new alternative targeting option for brands without taking a hit on their ROI?

This blog has all the answers you need. Read it till the end as you won’t want to miss a single detail about Silverpush’s omnichannel hyper-contextual advertising solutions helping brands thrive in the cookieless world.

Why is There a Need to Go Cookie-Less?

“Before cookies, the web was essentially private. After cookies, the web becomes a space capable of extraordinary monitoring,” said Lawrence Lessig 20 years ago.

For a long time now, advertisers have relied on cookies to monitor users across the internet and offer them customized ads based on their browsing behavior.

However, the usefulness of cookies is witnessing a downfall as they are heading toward obsolescence.

As per Google’s recent reports, by the end of 2024, Google’s Chrome browser is anticipated to restrict third-party cookies, which are already blocked on Safari and Firefox.

Google’s Chrome browser dominates the industry with a market share of over 60 percent in Europe and is widely used across multiple regions globally. As a result, we predict that Google’s proposed cookie policy is likely to spell the end of cookie-based advertising.

Advertisers will face a significant challenge as other tracking techniques also face mounting pressure. Notably, Apple’s app-tracking-transparency (ATT) framework already requires app providers to obtain explicit user consent before tracking them via device identifiers in the mobile app space.

Preliminary data suggests that only around 46% of consumers are willing to be tracked, and this percentage may be even lower in countries where privacy is a major concern for users.

The recent update in Apple’s policies means that app providers will face limitations in tracking users through device identifiers within the Apple ecosystem. Meaning, most users will not be trackable, which could have implications for targeted advertising and user profiling.

It’s worth noting that both Google and Apple have publicly stated that they will not support any attempts to create workarounds, such as probabilistic fingerprinting, to enable user-level profiling within their ecosystems.

Advertisers Need to Look Out for Themselves

It’s predicted that the elimination of third-party cookies and device identifiers will likely have a negative impact on advertising effectiveness and ultimately on the ROI for advertisers in the short term.

This will pose a significant challenge for brand marketers in sectors that are not closely tied to customer transactions, such as consumer packaged goods, automotive, and pharmaceuticals.

Despite the challenges, advertisers have several opportunities to strike a balance between precise targeting and accurate impact measurement while respecting consumer privacy.

Broadly speaking, implementing strategies that prioritize transparency and provide value to users in exchange for their data will most likely lead to success.

Many users are comfortable with personalized advertising as long as they are fully informed about the underlying mechanisms and not misled in any way. This approach can also help build consumer trust in the brand, which is a valuable outcome.

Upgrade your Advertising with Silverpush’s Hyper Contextual Cookieless Solutions

With the end of third-party cookies, advertisers need to shift to new solutions to engage with users in a privacy-safe and effective way.

Silverpush’s Mirrors offers contextual targeting solutions that deliver personalized ads to audiences without relying on their personal data. This ensures brand safety and relevance to the brand, even in a cookie-less environment.

Leverage the AI-powered solution of Mirrors by Silverpush to reach your relevant audience at the right time and place while respecting user privacy. Our platform guarantees complete brand safety and suitability on popular channels such as YouTube, OpenWeb, and CTV.

To learn more about how Silverpush can help you prepare for the cookieless world, simply fill out our form, and we’ll guide you toward successful advertising in a cookieless future.

Challenging. It is the correct word to describe how brands consider advertising in the automotive sector. 

This is mostly due to the long purchasing cycle by consumers involving a large chunk of money coming out of their pockets. 

Despite the challenges, automotive brands cannot afford to miss out on the immense consumer spending in this industry. In fact, the automotive industry is one of the largest spenders on advertising worldwide. According to a report by Statista, in 2020, the automotive industry in the United States alone spent a whopping 12.42 billion U.S. dollars on digital advertising.

Contextual advertising can be a highly effective strategy for automotive brands to reach their targeted audience in the right place, at the right time, and with the right message. This approach allows advertisers to target potential customers based on their interests, online behaviors, and purchase intent, without using their personal data.

What’s Unique About the Automotive Advertising Industry?

Before delving into automotive advertising strategies, it’s crucial to understand the unique nature of this industry. 

Vehicles are a significant financial investment, and consumers often spend a considerable amount of time in the consideration phase. In fact, car buyers spend an average of almost 14 hours online during their research and visit around 4.2 websites before making a purchase decision.

As the buying journey almost always starts online, reaching potential customers with a programmatic campaign is essential long before they step foot in a car dealership. 

Brands who want to reach their target audience need to first understand them. The target audience can vary depending on the type of vehicle being advertised. For instance, ads for luxury cars are targeted toward individuals with higher incomes, while family-friendly car ads are often aimed at individuals with lower to middle incomes who have families and need practical transportation options.

Also, the customer journey is an entirely complex process where customers rely on different platforms to get information about the car they are looking for. 

For instance, a person interested in buying a car may watch advertisements for cars on Connected TV (CTV) using their mobile or desktop devices. To learn more about a specific car, they may browse online through OpenWeb to gather information about the car’s engine, features, and other details. 

Additionally, they may ask for recommendations or advice from their friends on social media platforms like Meta to gain insights from other people’s experiences. By using multiple devices and platforms, the person can make a more informed decision when choosing a car that suits their needs and preferences.

This is where advertisers can leverage the situation to reach their target audiences at the right time and place when those audiences are most likely to be receptive to their ads and engage with them. 

Contextual advertising is a powerful tool in the automotive industry, as it enables brands to understand the context of a webpage and tailor their advertising message accordingly. This can capture the customer’s attention at the right moment and potentially influence their purchasing decision. By leveraging contextual data and creating relevant and engaging ads, brands can make an impact and connect with potential customers in a competitive and challenging industry.

Maximizing Advertising Relevance with Mirrors’ Hyper Contextual Advertising

Silverpush’s flagship product – Mirrors is an AI-powered hyper-contextual technology that watches and listens (word-by-word), allowing you to target audiences with both precision and scale-ultimately driving better brand outcomes.

It ensures that your messaging reaches your users, during key decision-making moments which further amplifies the message and taps into users’ current state of mind. Thus, driving higher performance and efficiency for some of the largest auto brands in the world.

One of our major auto brands benefited greatly from our next-gen hyper-granular context targeting powered by AI to leverage what auto consumers are watching on YouTube and drive trust and personal connection with a captive audience.

Plan an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy with Mirrors

Mirrors, the next-generation AI technology, offers brands a multi-platform solution to advertise across various channels, thereby extending their reach and amplifying their marketing efforts.

1. Open Web

Targeting audiences based on website content. Mirrors can also display ads based on the content of the user’s website. For example, if a user is reading an article about eco-friendly cars, contextual advertising can display ads for hybrid or electric cars.

2. YouTube

~ 90% of global shoppers surveyed say they discovered new brands or products on YouTube and 40% say they have purchased products they discovered on YouTube. Watch time of car videos on YouTube has grown by more than 65% in the past two years. When looking to buy a new car, consumers often turn to video research. Auto marketers can use this opportunity to reach potential buyers who are actively considering a purchase, even if they are not familiar with their product. Over 75% of auto shoppers say that online video has influenced their shopping habits and purchases.

3. Meta

By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, Mirrors carefully selects and processes brand-safe Facebook pages to extract contextual signals that enable the delivery of real-time, in-the-moment ads with exceptional performance. This advanced technology empowers brands to serve highly relevant ads while ensuring brand safety on Facebook.

4. Connected TV (CTV)

Mirrors analyzes content, creates custom ad segments, and uses semantic analysis to display ads in premium and relevant CTV video inventory, avoiding misplacement based on user emotions and behavior.

Exploring Real-World Use Cases of Mirrors

1. How Mirrors Helped an Automotive Brand in Competitor Conquesting

An automotive car brand leveraged Mirrors’ AI technology to identify cues related to key features of its competitors’ vehicles across different segments. With this information, the brand effectively targeted YouTube content containing these cues and seamlessly insert their brand messaging. By utilizing Mirrors, the automotive car brand efficiently and strategically reach its target audience while also gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.

2. Mirrors Enabled an Automotive Brand to Achieve Complete Brand Safety in Ad Display

Our client, an automotive car brand successfully utilized Mirrors to maintain brand safety while advertising on digital platforms.

Mirrors’ pre-defined visual and audio context identification allowed us to exclude videos that did not align with our core values. By conducting analysis, our AI became even more selective about when and where to block content, thus ensuring the perfect balance between brand protection and suitability.

Our brand safety standards, fully aligned with industry standards such as GARM, COPPA, CCPA, GDPR, and LDA compliance, were enhanced without over-blocking. Thanks to Mirrors, the automotive car brand effectively maintained brand safety while simultaneously maximizing our reach and engagement with our target audience on YouTube. 

3. Automotive Brand Utilizes Analysis for Contextual Ad Placement

Mirrors helped an automotive brand reach and engage with its target audience interested in automobiles. By leveraging their competitors’ brands through trigger identification based on brands (of Hyundai, Chevrolet, Nissan, etc.), brand ambassadors, influencers, car-tech reviews, automobile showrooms, test drive videos, and more, Mirrors maximized the brand’s exposure in the market.

Through Mirrors’ advanced AI technology, the visual triggers were analyzed and ads were at the right place and moment, effectively targeting the relevant audience.

How Can Brands Benefit from Mirrors’ Hyper Contextual Advertising Technology?

Get Started With An Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy for Your Automotive Advertising

The greatest challenge for marketers in the auto industry is driving users through the often lengthy path to purchase. Since people today are online on a variety of devices, and using a variety of channels, it’s crucial to have coverage across multiple digital environments. 

Multi-channel targeting enables advertisers to reach users across different platforms and channels. This helps a campaign achieve greater reach by capturing users wherever they are online. 

Ready to drive auto advertising performance? Fill out the form on your right and your Silverpush representative will contact you soon with more information on how to get started.

In 2023 expected data collection from the first-party and zero-party is 118 zettabytes.

Data is the backbone of modern marketing, providing brands with valuable insights into consumer behavior and enabling them to craft targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience. 

However, the landscape is rapidly changing, with evolving privacy policies making it increasingly challenging to collect and utilize data in a manner that respects user privacy.

This new reality has given rise to contextual advertising, which offers a less invasive approach and is better aligned with evolving consumer preferences. 

Also, inclining advertisers toward the first-party and zero-party data. By leveraging first-party and zero-party data, brands can still gain a deep understanding of their audience and create campaigns that deliver better results while abiding by the user’s privacy.

It’s interesting to note that contextual advertising is expected to witness significant growth in the coming years, with worldwide ad spending projected to reach 228 billion US dollars by 2023. One of the main drivers behind this growth is Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies, which have traditionally been the cornerstone of behavioral targeting.

While third-party cookies have been an effective tool for advertisers to target consumers based on their browsing behavior, there has been growing concern over user privacy and data protection. As a result, privacy-focused browsers like Firefox and Safari have already blocked third-party cookies over a decade ago.

Explore the Alternatives for Third-Party Data Targeting

The advertising industry has entered an experimental era. Marketers use the hit-and-trial advertising approach. They have incorporated contextual advertising into their behavioral targeting and have begun to favor first-party and zero-party data.

But what are Zero and First-Party Data? 

When information is shared with the intention and acknowledgment of the user it is zero-party data. This type of data includes customer preferences, interests, and opinions. Zero-Party Data can be collected in the following ways.

1. Surveys and Questionnaire: Brands ask questions or perform a survey to know the interests and opinions of the audience. For example, Nike surveyed to know which is the audience’s favorite shoe type among Air Force, Air Max, and Air Yeezy. This survey will give a fair idea about the audience’s interest in their product and with further analysis, Nike can target specific shoe ads to the specific user demographic.

2. Interactive Experiences: Companies can offer interactive experiences, such as quizzes or polls, that require customers to provide information about themselves. This can be a fun and engaging way for customers to share information with a company.

3. Contests and Giveaways: This way brands can easily promote themselves and collect the user’s data. For example, An FMCG brand posted a giveaway on Instagram where the user had to enter their details and tag 3 more people in the comment section. Through comments, the brand could get a large audience base and details of some users. Zero-party data is valuable because customers provide it voluntarily when they want to engage with a company.

According to 85% of marketing company respondents, zero-party data is essential for delivering effective tailored experiences. First-party data is passively collected by the brands. This data can include customer names, email addresses, purchase history, and website browsing behavior. The different methods through which first-party data can be collected is:

1. Website Analytics: Companies can use tools like Google Analytics to track website visitors and their behavior on the site, such as what pages they visit, how long they stay on each page, and whether they make a purchase.

2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Companies can collect information about their customers, such as their contact information, purchase history, and preferences, through their CRM systems.

3. Loyalty Programs: Companies can collect data on their customers through loyalty programs, which can track purchase behavior and offer personalized recommendations and promotions. First-party data is valuable because it helps companies understand their customers and provide more personalized marketing and customer experiences. 

What’s the Key Difference Between First-Party and Zero-Party?

The key difference between first-party and zero-party data is the method of data collection. The method of data collection impacts user engagement and accuracy. 

1. User Engagement: User engagement is much higher with the brand in zero-party because the consumer is directly engaged and has been sharing their information with consent. On the other hand, first-party data is passively collected. The data collected is based on the user’s interaction with the brand. 

2. Accuracy: First-party data will involve analytical tools, to get precise information. The data is collected on behavioral targeting strategy which implies the use of analysis at the end. Whereas, the data provided by the user will be correct because the user wants to engage with the brand and wishes to avail the value provided by them in exchange for their information. 

Conclusion

Overall, both types of data are valuable for companies as they allow for better understanding and targeting of customers. However, zero-party data is more likely to result in high-quality, personalized customer experiences as it is based on direct input from customers themselves. Another reason that would lead to the rise of zero-party data would be the consent of the user. Every day people are becoming conscious of their information which has already led to the phase-out of third-party data. Since the information gathered will be with the consent of the user, the privacy issues would be eradicated.