As we witness this significant notion towards data privacy and user-consent turning into a reality in today’s digital world. It will lead us to a new world of cookieless web. But this certainly, throws new challenges as well for the advertisers, marketers and the entire business world. For them, the key question is — how do we effectively reach out to an ever-evolving audience in a cookieless world? And the simple answer lies in harnessing and leveraging the capabilities of AI or what the world knows as Artificial Intelligence.
Change is brewing
The rising concerns on user data privacy and protection have forced browsers to change their tracks. In fact browser, giants like Apple Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome have either already disbanded their third-party cookie storage approach or are working towards the same. This essentially means the digital marketing landscape is changing rapidly.
However, this doesn’t necessarily have to spell disaster for marketers. Precision targeting and individualized communication between businesses and users can still mushroom by maximizing first-party data collection on websites. This consent-based data collection helps increase users’ trust, reliance, and retention on the platform.
But the marketing fraternity’s concern remains – how do we effectively target communication to the relevant consumers without cookies? The solution, as mentioned earlier, most definitely is artificial intelligence. We have evolved from the earliest forms of marketing to becoming digital natives over the last two decades, and now we’re progressing into becoming AI natives. And the cookieless web might as well serve as the catalyst in this situation.
How exactly can AI help navigate the cookieless web?
To begin with, AI systems comprise complex neural networks that are fed and trained with incredible amounts of data. Based on this data, the AI begins to learn actions, predict outcomes and recommend optimal actions to achieve a particular marketing goal.
The most heartening news for marketers however is the fact that AI is able to provide deep insights into the constantly evolving customer base and improve the understanding brands have of their users, without cookies. AI can bridge the gap in data that is proving to grow wider due to consumer protests and safety concerns about data collection and usage.
AI effectively can fill the gap that cookie restrictions are bound to create – from enabling omnichannel communication to taking contextual advertising to a whole new level. Deep learning algorithms and natural language processing models are becoming progressively more adept at identifying and predicting customer intent.
These AI models analyze and learn from billions of first-party data points on brands’ owned channels as well as other external sources in order to make predictions and recommendations in real-time.
Jeff Bezos could not have been more right when he said, “AI is in a ‘golden age’ and solving problems that were once in the realm of sci-fi”. We live in a world that grooves to the tunes of tighter user privacy frameworks and responsible access to consumer data, as it rightly should, and AI is the paramount path towards achieving optimal ROI and uplifting business growth phenomenally.
Additionally, with AI strengthening omnichannel communication, marketers can target user sets across channels thus amplifying campaign impact with conversational marketing.
In short, the impending cookiepocolypse doesn’t necessarily paralyze businesses from achieving their long and short-term goals and desirable stature. In fact, it has opened doors to enable more opt-in-based targeting marketing methods and is acting as a spur for rapid technological advancements, keeping safety and privacy in mind.
Throughout the ages, remarkable advancements in every field have been made in the face of adversity and challenges. And so comes marketing and AI’s turn to propel forward in leaps and bounds.
(This article is written by Neel Pandya, CEO – APAC, Pyxis One. The views expressed in this article are of the author.)