In 2021, Statista conducted a survey that found that 51% of senior marketers found cookie-based marketing extremely important to carry out their marketing strategy. Fast forward to 2023, and we have all become accustomed to the pop-ups asking us if we will allow cookies on virtually every website we visit. With third-party cookies set to sunset in 2023, every marketing professional should be planning on “life after the cookie” (insert the comment that assures you this does not apply to “chocolate chip cookies are not going away” here). Above The Fold has been working on “life after the cookie” since we were founded. Programmatic contextual advertising has emerged as one of the most popular and soundest replacements for third-party cookies. Programmatic has many benefits, and it becomes compelling when partnered with contextual marketing. So let’s dive into a quick overview of what got us here and how programmatic contextual marketing will help you feel good about the cookie apocalypse.
Death of Third Party Cookies
- Since 2012/2013 – Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies.
- January 2020 – Google posted an infamous blog “Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete”.
- Google owns Chrome and Chrome represented over 50% of the global web traffic in 2020. Google also clearly owned a large portion of the advertising world, making this declaration significant.
- June 2021 – Google announced it would phase out third-party cookies in late 2023.
What Is Contextual Advertising?
Contextual advertising serves ads based on the web page’s content or app being viewed. The most effective forms of contextual advertising are tailored to the user’s interests based on the website’s context or content they are looking at. This avoids the need for third-party cookies since the ads are based on the content that the consumer is viewing at the same time in which the ad is being served.
Context has always been one of the most potent characteristics of effective marketing. When an ad is shown to a consumer without knowledge of context, you are taking a major risk that you are going to:
- Be able to get the consumer interested.
- That it’s the right time to target the consumer.
- That the consumer is even a consumer that would be interested in your offering.
How to Be Successful at Contextual Marketing
The challenge of contextual advertising can be precision and scale. For contextual to be effective, you need to be sure you are only targeting consumers that are consuming context within a particular website or webpage that aligns with the consumer you seek to target. Once you have identified the proper context, finding enough placements for your advertisements to drive meaningful volume can be challenging. Additionally, 3.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily on the internet. You might beat the odds and be able to find enough content to scale. Still, it is nearly impossible to show fresh, new content that is popping up daily unless you use a programmatic approach to contextual marketing. Above The Fold has run millions of dollars in campaigns such as this. We have learned that the success receipt to programmatic contextual campaigns is one part data, one part art, and one part science.
Above The Fold would love to share our case studies and experience with you around contextual marketing. We work with hundreds of thousands of websites across various platforms to ensure you get the perfect campaign. Above The Fold has mastered the art of reporting to ensure your campaigns not only run programmatically but that you collect rich, deep insights on what is working within the campaigns. We have worked across every industry, including Real Estate, Healthcare, E-commerce, and more.
Please drop us a note so we can get you started on the right foot in programmatic.