One-to-one targeting and retargeting practices will diminish in scale as third-party identifiers are voided from the ecosystem, as marketers instead rely on smaller, more fragmented sets of opted-in first-party data. Likewise, contextual or cohort-based targeting approaches may serve to ease some consumer frustrations in the mid- to long term.
According to a March 2021 LoopMe survey, half of US adults said ads that promote the same products over and over are most off-putting to them. Another 22% most disliked seeing ads for products they don’t need, and 19% cited seeing ads for products they’ve mentioned only in private.
“I think brands are more open to going back to the idea of contextual messaging, even though we spent several years talking about one-to-one messaging,” said Jully Hong, vice president and group director of media technology at Digitas. “I do think there should be a bit of a reset in our world. Publishers have information about what content resonates. We’ve come to a place where content and context didn’t seem as valuable because we had all this cookie data, and regardless of where you were, we knew who you were. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to kind of go back to the basics to some extent.”