Goodbye Cookies and Pixels

Each week, we take an in-depth look at strategic, organizational, and operational challenges facing business leaders, with insights on emerging best practices. Today, we dive into innovations in the critical path to establishing and transforming first-party customer data and a data-driven culture, as third-party cookies are phased out and pixel-blocking becomes widespread.

One of the biggest challenges for marketers, membership directors, subscription managers and organizations in general is the ability to reach and engage current and prospective customers and members while maintaining compliance with a growing list of country and state regulations, not to mention adapting to today’s technology-driven changing landscape.

Transformation to an actionable, transparent data-driven business model is critical to address the complexity of compliance, personalization, and privacy. Mastery of data is complex considering system limitations, lack of skillsets and/or lack of understanding of the definition, value and actionability of customer data.

At 2040, our core belief is that true data-driven cultures and business model embeds, understands and focuses on concentric circles of interrelated data and establishes the priority for high quality data collection across every internal and external process in place. Data must have definition and meaning in context of the organization and the relationship with its customers.

Regardless of where an organization is on their path to becoming data-driven, the entire ecosystem is about to change. These shifts will drive critical changes in strategies and tactics of any plans or practices already in place if an organization seeks to survive in the evolving dynamic digital marketplace.

Data Points

As digital has evolved, so have the opportunities to leverage data collected by an organization or others through second- and third-party data. Majorly, organizations to date have relied on data collected by third-party aggregators, anonymous data aggregated by platforms into “look-alike” audiences, and/or data created directly by current customers via an organization’s web and app-based interactions.

Over time, organizations have grown accustomed to leveraging the variety of currently available data to curate and engage current customers as well as create awareness of their value with prospective customers. The quality of data used to date has always been in question. However, it was the only available data and seemed, even with limits, to generate results. It also allowed for measurement of actual effort/spend contrasted to the historical “spray and pray” tactics of broadcast or physical print-based efforts (mail, newspapers, magazines). Data provided a credible method to evaluate performance that was more objective than subjective.