Adrian Watkins

When Google announced on January 14th that they were ending support for third party cookies it shook the digital ad world. 

The feedback was swift and pointed about how this change would put a nail into the proverbial coffin of programmatic advertising and targeting efforts – seemingly to Google’s advantage. The rationale behind removing this ability is centered on consumer privacy concerns and the growing chorus of data leaks over the past few years.

What will this mean for the industry at large? We suspect this move to eliminate third party cookies is going to push the digital ad market to innovate. In the long term, this will benefit all participants in the digital ad market.

How We Got Here

The origins of the digital marketing intelligence market go back to the early 2000’s when search engines and other research providers discovered that as they were indexing web pages, they were also gathering data on the digital ads present on those sites.

Fast forward a few years, and the rise of programmatic advertising drove continued innovation in the category to allow marketers, advertisers, and publishers to view and report on these ads.

Pathmatics patented an approach to indexing ads that not only captured the site that an ad appeared on, but also captured the Ad Path. This approach enabled partners to monitor each ad impression through the nearly infinite combination of transactions from publisher to SSP to ad networks and ad exchanges, through DSPs and trading desks, and ultimately to the advertiser.

What this means for marketing intelligence

A primary motivation for advertisers, agencies, publishers and platforms to leverage digital marketing intelligence was to put a spotlight on the activity in programmatic to review ad quality, placements and the competitive landscape. This continued through the early 2010’s, where we began to see three trends transforming the digital landscape.

• First, we saw the rise of Facebook and social advertising as a growing share of budget for all digital marketers.
• Second, there were technology shifts in programmatic and targeting that disabled the ability to capture data for many platforms through a crawler based approach.
• Third, eyeballs and budgets were shifting away from desktop and to mobile.

This article first appeared here.