Email Potential Solution to Cookie-less Targeting

In a roundup of expert commentary, PMG’s Katie Anderson recently shared her thoughts with AdExchanger about email being a potential solution for advertisers looking to replace third-party cookies as an online identifier. The article highlighted the fact that several solutions from The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and the IAB use email in their respective technology foundations.

According to Anderson, “Email has an infinitely longer look-back window, can seamlessly map together devices at the user level and incomparable accuracy.” To illustrate email’s benefits, she cited the examples of Facebook and Amazon, and their “unique ability to personalize ads to all of the activities a user has associated with their email login and viability sans cookie.”

However, she also said marketers must proceed with caution. “The big benefits of email, though, are also its Achilles’ heel as a full replacement for the cookie. It’s not universal, it requires time and trust from a user and the quality gained from an actively opted-in audience means a tradeoff with scale across the open exchange. With privacy and transparency top of mind, I anticipate that the more widely-used currency for audiences and tracking will need to use a combination of email with other high-quality sources, such as contextual technologies and log-level data, to tell the full story versus full reliance on one single source as it has historically.”

Read the full article to get other insights, including those from the CEO of LiveIntent and CTOs of Magnite (formerly Rubicon Project) and Adform.