Marketers can no longer bluff Google. The company finally removed cookies for 1% of Chrome users (or about 30 million people) in January. And like the conversation around PAIR, Google’s new identity solution that allows publishers and advertisers to match first party data to deliver personalized ads is gaining momentum every day, there’s one thing we can be sure of: when it comes to opting out of cookies, this time, it’s for real.
With Google continually pushing back the cookie opt-out deadline, advertisers neither expected nor prepared for the demise of cookies. As a result, even with the cookiepocalypse bearing down on them, most programmatic buyers have yet to adopt cookie alternatives.
Now, advertisers are scrambling to find the solution. And maybe just that alternative data, a type of big data ironically popularized for the financial sector, could also be a game changer for digital advertising. Alternative data is a promising solution in the cookie-cutter chaos.
No one is ready for cookie crunch time
Identity vendors are having a blast creating solutions to fill the void that cookies will inevitably leave, spawning a range of identification solutions ranging from Trade Desk’s Unified Identifier 2.0, LiveRamp’s RampID and Google’s PAIR and Privacy Sandbox. Many publishers don’t have the budget and investment capabilities to test them all, so they rely on buyers to do the work for them. An alternative identification solution is expected to eventually reach the top.
While we await alternative identifications to resolve, full confidence first party data it’s still not ideal, especially for smaller partners who have to rely on retail media networks to provide them with this proprietary data. Other methods, such as contextual targeting, are starting to fall by the wayside as advertisers continually seek the same returns that cookies provide.
While proprietary data, retail media networks, and even zero-part data still have their place, the marketplace needs multiple tools to work together to support a post-cookie solution. Alternative data is coming! Another soon to be essential in the toolbox.
What is alternative data?
Initially used in the investment world, alternative data it became mainstream in this industry as hedge funds and investment managers began using it to gain an edge over competitors who still largely used its counterpart, traditional data.
In finance, traditional data consists of quarterly reports, company statements, and other publicly available data sources that are used to make investment decisions. Alternative data came to mean anything else and now consists of data obtained over the Internet, satellite imagery, credit and debit transactions, mobile app data, and more.
Over time, alternative data moved beyond its initial world of hedge funds into the rest of the financial industry and eventually into the hands of government bodies and policy makers, not to mention credit bureaus. and commercial companies. Now, it’s entering the marketing world as a temporary add-on solution to the cookie crisis. As traditional “cookie” data disappears, alternative data, of the kind that can be acquired through geolocation information, public databases, and the like, becomes part of the puzzle that replaces it.
When you layer AI tools on alternative data and the increasing digitization of information, the capabilities to use large amounts of data from the Internet and other sources become much easier to use. Alternative data may appear as one of the pioneer cookie alternatives and advertisers are starting to take notice.
The alternative data boom
The use for decades of alternative data in the financial industry is proving to be a forerunner for the use of alternative data in market research and consumer insights.
With solutions like forecasting, a combination of “now” and “forecast,” which presents near-real-time data to drive things like dynamic pricing, alternative data can increasingly present the answer, or an answer, as the cookie continues to sink.
According to Deloitte, global alt data revenue is expected to reach $137 billion by 2030. That’s 29 times global alt data revenue today. While investment management is expected to drive most of this growth, advertising may increasingly account for this revenue.
Alternative data reconciliation with conventional cookie solutions
So what does it do? alternative data does it really have to do with the disappearance of cookies?
While cookies may soon be gone, newer technologies like AI and big data analytics are only growing. Machine learning’s ability to analyze alternative data and deliver valuable insights could be a game changer in the advertising industry.
As cookie-free solutions evolve from a pleasant necessity, alternative data is poised to not only serve as a useful tool for investors, but also for advertisers.
Once the cookies are gone, gone, really gone, alternative data will feel very ordinary.
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