Read the original article in Italian on Engage here.
The next twelve months represent a major inflection point for the digital ad industry, arguably, the biggest point of change ever in the history of advertising. The introduction of new privacy and platform regulations will fundamentally restrict the industry’s ability to target individual users and track cross-site activity. Many ad industry players are already adapting and preparing for the new reality, however, others continue to live in denial about the sheer extent of the disruption that lies ahead.
The key triggers for this change are the final withdrawal of third-party cookies from Google’s Chrome web browser by 2022 and the upcoming launch of iOS 14.5 from Apple, which is expected to require apps to seek opt-in consent from users before they can share data across different publishers or sites. While web browsers such as Safari and Firefox have already blocked the use of third-party cookies, the fact that Chrome has more than 60% of the market has allowed some agencies to simply divert budget there and pretend that the world wasn’t changing. That time is fast running out. Without third-party cookies and with fewer individual identifiers from iPhones, aspects of digital marketing that we have come to take for granted and barely think about – such as, frequency capping – are about to be seriously impacted.
