Matt Harty, Experian, GM, Audience Solutions, APAC, looks at developments for the region’s third-party data market, and asks how well the programmatic advertising sector in APAC is addressing the audience disjunction problem, particularly in a market that is largely ‘mobile-first’ where cookies are becoming more-and-more redundant.  

We buy, we don’t understand what we get. We store, but we can’t use a lot of what we buy, and also lose much of what we could have used.  We remarket, but we have massive holes in our data pools (like app traffic and Apple users).

Marketers buy clicks. They may buy them from search, social, display or they may be coming from offline activities that are driving to the web. Much of this audience will be anonymous to the marketer as these visitors will not share any personal information. Many will be untraceable, as these visitors either cannot accept cookies or choose not to.

This results in the majority of the audience that a marketer has invested in, being anonymous, perishable or both.

When a marketer buys a click, it is usually a visitor sent to the website from search, social or display. There will often be a behavioural clue. This may be from an ad associated with the click that indicates interest in a particular product or approach, or it may be as a result of a query of specific search keywords.

Clicks usually do not bring any other information with them. When the click hits the marketer’s site, the ability to value the differences (and related potential ROI) between these visitors is minimal.  This is because unless the visitor is logged-in or shares some personal information, they will be anonymous.

Anonymous traffic cannot be valued beyond the immediate behavioural actions (clicks, page-views) that the person has done. This means that remarketing investments cannot be channelled to where the highest ROI is likely to be found. A marketer can only invest equally.

What would be nice would be the ability to value visitors as they arrive. Robust third-party data sources can be very helpful in doing this. A marketer who has no idea who has just landed on their site can ask a reliable third-party who can pass demographic or other valuable information about this visitor if they have it.

In APAC, the third-party data marketplace is still very nascent.  Companies such as Eyeota, MediaQuark, Bluekai and Experian have made progress investing in developing this area but in the meantime, brands’ incoming visitors remain anonymous and impossible for them to value beyond the visitor’s behaviour or declared information.

The world of today’s digital marketer is ruled by the cookie. An aging technology that is finding both increased resistance and diminishing utility. Privacy and other legal concerns are making cookie use in some jurisdictions tricky or near impossible.

In Asia, although largely unregulated about use of the cookie currently, many multi-national corporate publishers follow Western law. There is a lot of noise and discussion about adopting more advanced laws locally but a wait and see approach could benefit Asian countries in order to avoid unintended negative economic effects.

Waning cookie utility is a worry. Cookies work well for PCs, but third-party cookies are increasingly unwelcome with modern browsers (Firefox, IE & Safari) who seek to block them wholesale.

The mobile web is even more complex with iOS devices not accepting cookies. Mobile apps have their own identifiers like IDFA. These identifiers do not translate back to mobile web cookies and cannot be used to retarget ads on websites.

So there are limits on the use and usefulness of cookies.

This leaves us with a compounded problem. The traffic marketers are buying is very difficult to value and may not be useful beyond the active session when the visitor is on the brand’s site. What marketer’s invest their media dollars in; can be both anonymous and perishable.

For digital marketing to progress, particularly mobile marketing, there needs to be answers to these problems. If the bulk of the money invested goes into visitors who cannot be valued, visitors that most won’t convert and there is a limited ability to remarket to the ones who don’t buy, the industry has a big problem. The wheels are falling off online marketing.

Hope exists in the form of third-party data coming to our markets. This will help us address the ‘anonymity’ problem. If marketers have someone to query when they see an unknown visitor who may shed light on the demographic or economic information associated with this unknown user, then great value is generated for the marketer. Such data sets are now emerging in APAC.

The ‘perishability’ problem is tougher. Cookie alternatives are available. Ensuring that these cookie alternatives will work for your marketing takes both planning and study. It is one thing collecting IDs, being able to use them is another matter entirely. Having a viable ecosystem that supports your marketing is rationally the goal for the short/medium term, as ubiquity of IDs maybe slow in coming or even be impossible medium term.

I like to think we are in a chrysalis stage in digital marketing. We will emerge as the vibrant butterfly with all of our marketing woes solved and our processes improved. This may take a while and will require (most of) our industry acting in unison.

What we have right now is a dysfunctional process for handling incoming prospects. We have a lot of streamlining to do. We need robust and scaleable third-party data sets.

Marketers need a robust first party data management strategy – understand their customers better, clean up their databases, enable portability and persistence of their data sets. All of this will deliver additional financial benefits.

Fixing these issues, will add to digital’s existing reputation of the most cost-effective channel for driving ROI. We just have to develop and deploy the right tools.