Blah blah ios 14 blah blah ad blockers blah blah the sky is falling
Look I get it. The glory days of tracking everything all the time are done. People understand to a degree how cookies work and they don’t like it. Apple, Firefox, and a bevy of other large companies have realized this and instituted privacy as a core offering to attract new customers.
Capitalism gonna capitalism, hate the game not the player.
Thing is though everyone screaming that the sky is falling are just, well, wrong. Yes cookies will go the way of the dinosaur. Yes, things are gonna get weird for a minute. Do you honestly believe though that a 720 billion dollar company is just gonna go “aww shucks y’all I guess the jig is up. Let’s shut down”
Hell. No.
If Facebook has to they’ll launch their own cellphone brand, their own ISP, and everything else under the sun necessary to keep one of the most lucrative empires in the history of mankind alive if they have to. There’s too much riding on this ads business, and to be clear no matter how hard Facebook or Google try they are at their core ads businesses.
Facebook, Google, and the larger adtech ecosystem have been planning for a cookie-less future for a while now. The writing has been on the wall. Is it gonna be pretty? No. Is it over? Not by a long shot.
CAPI and serve side analytics are going to work to a degree.
Sandboxed experiences will be more common.
There’s a massive bevy of information that your phone, laptop, and everything else give away constantly that solve tracking issues.
We’re not done, we’re just evolving from the neolithic age to the copper age, and evolution can be a bit bumpy.
Beyond that, even if tracking is killed off guess what?
Ads still work.
Remember that show Mad Men? People ran ads then and they’ll run ads in the future. Ads do work regardless of your ability to track the edge conversion in a one to one ratio. Maybe we’ll have to take a long look at campaigns and maybe we’ll have to rely more on things like match market testing. (Billboard A in Denver Billboard B in Austin lets see which does better).
The point is that ads have and will continue to work. Especially the good ones.
Will there be a kill off of weak and bad agencies?
You bet, and I’m here for it.
Facebook’s cheap media and crack like addiction they inspire with their granular conversion tracking gave rise to a class of marketers that have no business being marketers. These are people chasing easy dollars that have no discernable skill, and if I’m honest, are probably half of the Facebook marketers I run into today. When they run because things get hard and the market shrinks it will only benefit the rest of us.
For the rest of you, batten down the hatches, understand evolution is underway, and use this as an opportunity to prove your worth to your clients by being more than a professional Facebook reseller and add some real value through media diversification, strategy, holistic analytics + tracking, and more.
