Hearts & Science’s Metzer: Without the Cookie, Advertising Will Rely on First-Party Data

Hearts & Science’s Metzer: Without the Cookie, Advertising Will Rely on First-Party Data

SAN FRANCISCO– The death of cookie has caused a stir in the advertising and ad tech worlds, as marketers are now figuring out how best to understand consumer behavior without the data collector.

Eran Metzer, executive director of data and marketing strategy at Hearts & Science, believes the industry will be resilient to the change.

“For some perspective, cookies were invented a long time ago for a different purpose.

Advertising has piggybacked on top of that vehicle,” Metzer told Beet.TV’s Jon Watts in an interview at LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit.

“Now that cookies are starting to disappear, and reliability is going away, different methodologies can be applied.” Those methodologies largely rely on first-party data.

“Understanding that engagement point with your consumer really creates a bridge into people-based marketing,” he says.

From there, advertisers can build a model audience and target them.

At least in the short term, this methodology benefits large scale media outlets because they have the biggest pool of logged-in users from which they can collect first-party data.

That should change within a year as the marketplace normalizes around the currency of addressable first-party data.

Without the strategy of mixing first and third-party data, all companies will have to find new ways to model audiences off of first-party data alone.

During that transition period, fragmentation may present an issue, which Metzer says can only be confronted with try-and-repeat methods.

But new methodologies won’t break the industry.

“It won’t shake up and break everything.

Other models are being created,” he says.

While there are more restrictions, there are also more dimensions to the strategy, namely more devices, formats, engagement and attention.

“When you balance it all together we’re in a better spot.” The most important next step is to understand the consumer and engage with them in a consented environment.

But consent isn’t binary.

“What you want is high-quality consent, where the consumers understand why you need their data and what you’re doing with it,” says Metzer.” This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.

This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.