Despite the growing fear of the coronavirus in recent weeks, we decided to pack our hand sanitizer and attend LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit in San Francisco. We found that the RampUp conference brings together real marketing technology thought leadership from brands, agencies, publishers and technology partners on topics that matter. Most of this year’s conversations centered around value exchange, trust and consent, and low friction experiences. Here’s our major takeaways:
The cookie is crumbling, and we will all be better for it.
First it was Safari and Firefox, and most recently Chrome. The demise of the third-party cookie was inevitable and came as no surprise. Users are demanding more privacy and control over how their data is used and as a result, the ecosystem needs to adapt.
The ecosystem will get cleaned up… eventually.
Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Ecosystem at MediaMath, said it well – “The entire supply chain needs to be blown up and start over”. With the move into the post-cookie world, we expect to see this start happening as the ecosystem evolves to be built on real people and trust. Any ecosystems built on identifiers without consent will fail – mobile device IDs, they’re looking at you.
Value exchange, trust, consent, repeat.
The theme of this year’s conference may have been value exchange, trust and consent – and we heard it again and again throughout the two days – but it’s not a new idea. We’ve known that the focus should be on the consumer, but it seems like we are now making progress as an industry on where to focus that effort. On both ends of the supply chain, advertisers and publishers know that they must find a way to better explain the value the consumer is getting in exchange for their data.
Contextual targeting will be important, but it’s not your grandma’s contextual.
Marketing 101 taught us that we needed to show the right message at the right time and of course, to the right person. The industry focused efforts on audience targeting in order to do this. Meanwhile, contextual targeting has now reemerged as an opportunity to point us in the right direction in a post-cookie world. Again, not a new idea, but an evolved one due to advancements in machine learning.
At the end of the day, it’s an exciting time to be in digital advertising and our role as a media agency hasn’t changed. We succeed when our clients succeed and we continue to help our clients reach their goals by providing value as a partner through talent, expertise and advising on the best platforms and solutions across the ecosystem.
