In a bid to stay on the right side of public opinion and protect their brand equity, a growing number of technology companies are now blocking browser cookies as a matter of course.
The Safari operating system has been blocking all third-party cookies by default since March 2020, when Apple released Safari 13.1 with updates to its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) privacy feature. Apple’s decision prevents online advertisers, analytics firms, and everybody else from using Safari browser cookies to track internet users as they flit from site to site.
To be clear, this Safari browser update doesn’t block all user tracking, only those methods that rely on first planting a cookie and then later checking it to identify newly arriving users. And, according to Apple, the company was already blocking most third-party tracking cookies anyway.
Of greater significance, perhaps, was Apple’s decision to turn off, again by default, third-party cookie tracking across ALL mobile web browsers—including Google Chrome—in its iPhone mobile operating system, iOS 14.
Google was actually the first big player to rally browser makers in the service of achieving a cookieless digital frontier. In a May 2019 blog, Google announced plans to block third-party cookies by default in Chrome and in its Chromium open-source project. Chromium punches way above its weight because it provides some, if not most, of the code used in many other well-traveled browsers. These include Amazon Silk, Avast, Blisk, Brave, Epic, Microsoft Edge, and Opera.
As these tech broadsides perfectly demonstrate that cookies are losing relevance in, and disappearing from, the digital landscape, the question becomes ….
Now what?
At [24]7.ai, we’ve spent the last few years getting ready.
Case in point: We specifically designed our proprietary suite of audience-targeting products to operate in this brave new world. These products are powered by their ability to deliver unexpected contextual relevance that surprises and delights customers, not by cookies.
[24]7.ai audience-targeting products use artificial intelligence to enable our clients to quickly identify and deliver the right, personalized message to their customers at the right time for different stages of their journey.
The suite enables you to personalize individualized aspects—such as weather, time of day, day of week, calendar events, sporting events, (shoppable) recipes, language, location, and contextual or geo-targeting—that don’t depend on cookies to optimize or measure AI activation effectiveness.
Furthermore, we offer proprietary technology, developed for use with your preferred Identity Provider, that enables effective, cookieless use cases such as retargeting, frequency-based personalization, and ad sequencing.
Of course, none of the above matters if your sales don’t budge. Well, I’m happy to report that [24]7.ai clients using our audience-targeting products report outstanding sales results!
Our clients typically see sales improvements like this:
And the best news? Your performance advantage using our cookieless audience-targeting solution is only going to widen as, inevitably, more companies block or drop cookies.
Maybe you’re wondering how we get this done. Our audience-targeting personalization portfolio includes the following key components.
Identify patterns in your actual customers' interaction data across journeys to direct your advertising budget to your most-profitable customers.
Use machine learning to identify high-value customers; dynamic and personalized content to show visitors the products and services they are likeliest to purchase; and remarketing technology to bring return visitors back to where they left off.
Draw on a variety of digital signals—web journeys, purchase history, demographics, personas—to show customers contextual, personalized content and ads in real time.
Enable real-time messaging, chatbot, or live chat within digital ads to speed the customers sales or service journey. Customers click an ad and jump straight into a conversation with the right agent or employee.
To learn more about building your competitive advantage in a cookieless world with [24]7 Target, our suite of AI-enabled, personalization-driven audience-targeting products, please contact me, John Sandwick: john.sandwick@247.ai or 312.933.5988.
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