Partner perspective from Erin Tye, director of content insights and innovation, Nativo
The death of the third-party cookie is finally upon us. By the end of 2024, Google Chrome will have closed ranks with Safari and Firefox to eliminate third-party cookies, ending years of speculation and anticipation.
The impact of this development is hard to overstate. The digital advertising industry has been dependent on third-party cookies for audience targeting since its inception, and despite years of advance notice, only 8% of marketers say they are” fully prepared” for the departure of third-party cookies.
With billions of dollars at stake, the entire marketing industry is asking: What do we do now? For many, the answer may lie with predictive audiences.
Scalable and privacy-safe, predictive audiences use artificial intelligence to build new audience groups based on predicted behaviors ranging from “this audience is likely to engage with nutritional content” or “this audience is likely to purchase in the next week.”
Predictive audiences work by ingesting contextual signals from a “seed” audience and then using those signals to predict which other users would be in a similar category (because they have similar contextual signals). Put simply, it’s look-alike modeling but without cookies. The seed “signals” can come from a variety of first-party sources: publishers, advertisers or ad-tech platforms. It could also be generated using paid panelists.
At Nativo, we took the idea of predictive audiences a step further by building expanded audiences based specifically on content engagement. We call this Nativo Predictive Audiences. The contextual signals this algorithm might look for include behaviors such as average time spent, click-through rate or conversions. It also factors in elements such as placement category and content location on the brand publisher page.
For brand publishers trying to maximize impact, this approach is a no-brainer. If the goal is to reach audiences most likely to engage with your content, why not start with the people who’ve already done it? Nativo Predictive Audiences allows brands to reach audiences even on browsers that block or limit the use of cookies.
With thousands of pieces of content distributed across thousands of sites, Nativo has used Nativo Predictive Audiences to build hundreds of off-the-shelf audiences that are ready to use. We can even tailor custom segments based exclusively on the published content of one brand.
It’s still possible to reach new audiences, boost engagement and drive full-funnel outcomes, all without a single third-party cookie. The time is now for brand publishers to experiment with predictive audience targeting and future-proof their content investments.