Thank you Lindsay, for being a manager I can count on to not only keep me accountable and growing in my role, but also as someone who always takes the time to check in personally on how I’m doing – that extra question always means so much.

Erin S.—You are always available and eager to answer my (sometimes silly) questions and make me feel included! You made starting a new job a lot less intimidating and I really appreciate you for it. Plus: Cute dog.

Krista! She is the most positive and supportive person. I feel so so lucky to work with her. She is an amazing co-worker and friend.

Kellie Fellie! How the heck you do everything you do and at such a high level amazes me. You are a smartypants who keeps positive and makes me look smarter

Taylor is just a great friend and confidant who is always there to lend an ear or help out! Yay Taylor!

It was insanely hard for me to pick just one woman to thank. I think the one who has made the single biggest difference in my work life is Erin Smith – seeing her blossom into taking the storytelling lead (and really the creative lead) on Oracle has been awesome. She continually brings her best attitude and solutions-minded thinking to any size of the project and is always willing to change things for the better.

I wanted to say thank you to Kelsey (even if it’s been awhile since we’ve worked together!). When I started at 90octane, you made a difference in my first few weeks with your welcoming and positive attitude. Your teams and clients are lucky to have your leadership.

Becky was a huge help in sorting out all the maternity prep paperwork– and so supportive and excited for me!

I really appreciate Kellie’s friendship and our catch up chats that are a mix of work & fun (but mostly laughing!).

I appreciate Caitlin bringing her whole self to work– I love to chat about spin classes & it encourages me to fit in a quick workout during the day!

SO much gratitude to Kellie Fellie! For sharing her knowledge and brainpower and also taking the time to chat with me about our personal lives, I enjoy working with you!!

Kari – thank you for all you do. Your passion, energy, drive and intelligence make for a better workplace. You are someone I can always count on to drive great work and develop trusted client relationships

Jillian – thank you for all you do to make our work better. You have carved a new discipline within 90 that has change the work output for the better. Thanks for your drive, intelligence and positive attitude

Sarah: We don’t get to work together much anymore, but your guidance and overall “How can we make it cooler?” attitude toward creative work has made a BIG impact on me as a storyteller. Thank you for your patient direction in my early days at 90, your decisive leadership in the years since, and your ability to always pull out the fun in what we do. I sincerely appreciate you.

Kellie – Your relentless positivity and work ethic are something I greatly admire and look up to. Thank you for always being such a strong & supportive leader for everyone at 90.

Sarah – thank you for owning and driving experience design! it’s come a long way in a short amount of time, and I’m excited to see where you take it! 

Becky, thank you for all the blood/sweat/tears that you put into the financial strength of 90, we would be lost w/out you!

Caitlin – thank you for taking a leap of faith & joining out ream during a time when the world felt upside down! We’re lucky to have you!

Elyse – Thank you for being a driving force on Oracle – it’s incredible how the great work you and the team are doing on that account always turns into more opportunity! Keep up the great work – thank you!

Erin E – Thank you for being SO F-ING SMART and always bringing your A-Game to Boeing!  We/they are lucky to have you as a driving force on that account!

Erin S – Over the last couple years you’ve grown leaps & bounds… you are an incredibly talented storyteller & we are lucky to have found someone who learns/grows as quickly as you do! Keep it up!!

Gosia – Thank you for being an absolute PPC badass, always taking initiative, and constantly playing at a level 10 (BD audits, client campaigns, RFPs, etc.)! We’re lucky to have you on our team!

Jillian – Thank you for paving the way for what research will look like for 90 down the road, you are making an incredible impact on what our offerings are evolving to – and doing it with a constant smile on your face!!!

Kari – There isn’t enough space on this online form to tell you all the things I’m grateful for in working with you. You’re brilliant, driven, creative, and someone I really love working with! I’m not crying… you’re crying.

Karina – I don’t know how you do it… the thinking & creativity you bring to clients like GFOB makes 90 shine! Thank you!!!

Kaurie – I’m grateful for for all you do to keep the 90 name front & center… as we all know, it’s not an easy task!

Fellie – You are an absolute badass, which I am constantly grateful for! From your leadership, to your strategic thinking, your amazing work ethic, and can-do approach/attitude, it’s great working with such a powerhouse!

Kelly – Every day, for the last decade, I’ve been grateful that you’ve been such an integral, driving force at 90! This agency would not be in the great position it’s in today without your hard work, drive, commitment, and big-picture thinking! Thank you!!!!!!!!!!

Kelsey – To say I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with you is quite the understatement. I admire your drive, how approachable you are (both with clients & teams), your level-headed approach, and sense of humor! Thank you for being such an amazing part of the 90 team!

Krista – I appreciate your drive, enthusiasm, and amazing work ethic… not to mention how impressed I always am with how you get team shout-outs almost every Thirsty Thursday! I’d be willing to bet that you have the most “Give A Damn” submissions out of anyone   We’re lucky to have you on our team!

Kristina – I really appreciate all the hats you wear at 90 (especially the 90 marketing hat that I know takes a lot of your time). Thanks for always bringing your A-game… to everything you do!

Lindsay – I still remember meeting you for the first time down at Ink! & walking away from that coffee thinking… “Damn she’s smart, I REALLY hope she decides to join our team!” Good news for us that you did… you make 90 a better/smarter agency, daily!

Melaina – It was NOT easy putting all the pieces together for you to join our team… I remember after your initial interview with Jane, she said “90 would be a better place if you could hire Melaina.” So we pushed, and fought, and pushed some more… and we finally won! I agree w/Jane – 90 is a better place with you here!

Christie – thank you for helping 90 to function! I think it’s easy for some of us to forget how important accounting is to an agency but truly, you keep us afloat so thank you!!

Piper – I’m grateful that you are the kind of person who can not only be successful onboarding at 90octane during a global pandemic – but also be the kind of person who can thrive in this environment! Keep up the great work!

Taylor – It’s an honor and a privilege to be your Executive Sponsor   Seriously, I wanted to thank you for all the hard work and great thinking you put to Forcepoint & Boeing! It’s really impressive to see, how in such a short period of time, clients no longer see you as an account person, but as their strategic partner (for obvious reasons)! Keep up the awesome work!!!

Sarah – I’ve always known that you are smart, but I remember the meeting where your brilliance absolutely blew me away. We were in Fortress & you were walking a few of us through a creative strategy deck you created for Paladina Health. Not sure if I can thank you for being smart… but, THANK YOU FOR BEING SO DAMN SMART!

Kari – you are not only a QUEEN in your career but you are a great and true friend! I’m so grateful that we have grown not only in all the work we’ve done together these last few years but also as friends. I absolutely admire your ability to understand the granularity of each client’s business and teams that we work with in addition to every single piece of work we do in their programs. Your energy & passion motivates me and so many others on our team to bring our best to everything we do.

In fact, trust among people around the world is at an all-time low. In 2020 the trust of institutions (governments, NGOs and media) dipped below that of businesses in 18 of 27 of the most developed economies for the first time in modern history. That means that outside of a serious need to address systemic issues related to misinformation and inequality, that businesses are taking a larger role in forming bonds with people around the world.

Right now, businesses across industries bear more responsibility to provide an experience that is authentic, consistent and trustworthy. There is a hunger for it. And there is a serious competitive advantage in providing it. That is an exciting opportunity for everyone in marketing.

So why should you care about what 90octane, a marketing agency, thinks about trust?

Let’s be honest. Trust and marketing seldom travel in the same circles. Agencies over the years have made a name for themselves by choosing opportunity over integrity at every turn. By selling over relating. By not sticking around to see what actually happens when a “big idea” hits the market.

Which is why it is a really interesting time for agencies, and for 90octane. With as much distrust that has existed in the industry combined with historic lows in trust around the world, there’s an opportunity for brands to become more trusted with their customers, with digital as the primary means of forming those bonds.

Trust is cyclical, and measurement is critical.

Marketing is about what brands SAY in relation to what people THINK. But trust is built by what people DO – plain and simple. And digital marketing has changed the landscape on measurement and performance. We can see if trust is forming over time with audiences, outside of the usual sales metrics we’re looking to achieve. Attribution of not only interest, but behavior, is no longer a pipe dream.

With that kind of behavioral data now at our fingertips, it can be tempting to manipulate variables to get a better immediate return. But that leads down a path focused on a single transaction rather than a long-term relationship. Therein lies the challenge – to be able to balance the short-term goals of MQLs and SQLs while also deepening trust in your brand. There are no divisions between campaigns, brands and customer experiences anymore. It’s all one effort with distinct aspects. And to do it well it takes an eye on short-term metrics and a head for long-term interpretation.

More than a new look
For all of these reasons, we’ve changed our own brand. Our logo nods to the cyclical nature of trust building – it’s never done and will always be in a state of change. Our website better reflects that perspective too, and how we’re building campaigns designed to build trust with customers. But more than that, we’re seeing the current state of the world as an opportunity to change marketing for the better. To take a ‘low-trust’ industry and make it what it should be –the primary means of communicating value to customers and a critical touchpoint to a stellar customer experience.

Check out our site to see what we’re up to. And stay tuned for more perspectives on trust in marketing from 90 over the next year.

“Majority of B2B advertising is ‘ineffective’”

Ineffective? The bulk of the work we spend our professional lives researching, concepting, creating and putting into market isn’t working? Well according to the LinkedIn B2B Institute…yeah. It’s a worthwhile read and without summarizing it too bluntly, the article finds that too much B2B creative seeks only to provide (or only succeeds in providing) information about a product or brand to aid in rational purchase decisions by leads or customers at some stage or another of the sale funnel.

What too much B2B creative doesn’t do, according to the article is acknowledge that leads, customers, audiences, prospects—all of them—are people, people with emotions, personalities, needs, hopes and fears. The creative ignores the human attributes that draw people in and make them care about it, and by association, a brand. The creative isn’t creative at all; it’s just content.

Content is info. Content fills pages. Content has product benefits. Content checks all the boxes that the rational consumer needs checked. But the fact is that even in a B2B context, there is no such thing as a rational consumer. Every human being buys with some degree of emotion, whether purchasing a new shampoo from the corner store or a SaaS platform at an enterprise level. We want to believe that what we are doing is best and we want to believe in what we buy. We want to act with trust.

So how do we foster trust in B2B creative? By looking at it as B2P creative. That’s Business-to-Person, if we’re coining phrases.

We have to recognize that however we segment our audience into personas, verticals or funnel status, we’re classifying it into groups of people with whom we need to connect. And to connect with them we need to understand them. We need to empathize. Do they need a little levity in their day? Let’s bring some (gasp) humor into a B2B campaign. Do they need a deeper understanding of our product but are drowning in emails, PDFs, and ebooks already? Let’s think about some narrative video to tell the story. Instead of weighing down the creative with jargon, why not lighten it up with art? We engage with what we find relevant, and so we must realize that there is no right medium or style for the product—only for the person we’re trying to reach.

When people start seeing their human selves in B2B creative, they’ll begin to trust that the companies creating it understand their needs. They’ll believe that their best interests are being considered. They’ll feel valued as people, not customers. So let’s start speaking to them that way.

OK, rant over. Now the silver lining …

We all share a basic need for truth. And now we’re not taking it for granted. We crave it. And with the government moving in a more straightforward direction (being optimistic here!), maybe we can all focus on increasing truth and trust in our interactions.

At 90, we see an opportunity for the marketing industry to step up. How much loyalty could you see if you were the first one to disclose your brand’s – or your client’s brand’s – shortcomings? What if you led with “we’re not designed to serve everyone”, narrowing your market instead of broadening it – and in the process deepening it?

If you’re marketing for an organization that’s willing to put itself out there in an authentic, transparent way, this is your moment. With truth at a premium, you can start down the path toward trust simply by showing integrity.

Of course, that’s just one element. Establishing trust also requires competence, reliability and empathy. If it sounds like a formula, it is. (Yes, authenticity can come to life in a methodical way.) Trust is tangible, earnable and manageable. And we’re excited to partner with clients in bringing that formula to life.

We’ll be sharing details of our Trust Methodology in blog posts and 90news of the future. But feel free to reach out today and we’ll give you the sneak peek.

In a work-from-home world, more companies will face having to interview, hire, and onboard remotely. For new hires, the process of integrating into the company and establishing connections with colleagues will present unique challenges—especially when we’re all separated by screens that effectively remove the element of human contact from interactions. In the virtual space, so many facets of engagement get lost in translation. Your comments aren’t always going to be heard. Conversation is not going to flow as freely. Your jokes aren’t always going to land. Or if they do, everyone will be on mute and you won’t get the laugh you were looking for.  

As a result, as a new hire, the wrench in adjusting to the world of remote work is not the “work” part. It’s the “remote.” 

Something I didn’t expect to miss from in-office work culture is “water cooler talk.” Those little opportunities every day to connect with another person—conversations that in the past might have been categorized as polite or even tedious. But oh, how I miss water cooler talk. There aren’t many water coolers to be had over Zoom, no physical space to socialize at work. I never understood how important the water cooler is to the process of building trust and rapport with one another. 

Much to my excitement, however, I have joined the 90octane team, one that is creatively trying to replicate the work socialization experience—and doing a great job. A year ago if you’d asked me if I enjoyed virtual happy hours, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. Now, I look forward to the agency-wide Thirsty Thursday every week. 

Like I said, it’s different. But virtual happy hours aside, there are simple and sincere ways to onboard new hires and help them feel like a part of the team, even when the team is apart.   

1. Make Virtual Introductions 

Your people are your culture. Your new hires aren’t going to have a strong connection to that culture without knowing those people. Setting up 1:1 introductions, planning a virtual coffee break or happy hour, or simply adding new hires to the appropriate Slack channels will open the lines of communication between them, and other established employees.  

Onboarding checklists prove to be helpful in this instance. Line items like “Meet With Account Team Lead” or “Set Up Meeting with Your Project Manager” are manageable tasks that will lend a hand to the new hire’s social integration while still helping them feel productive. 

While you’re making these introductions, providing the new hire with an up-to-date org chart certainly couldn’t hurt. This will help put faces and names into context. 

2. Client or Project Immersion

As a new hire, it’s uncomfortable to feel like you’re “behind” or burdensome to your new teammates. To further acquaint your new hire with the company, arrange onboarding sessions for the new hire to be effectively “immersed” into existing projects that they will need to contribute to in the future. They will be able to get more face time with the employees they’ll be interacting with day-to-day while getting up-to-speed on the company’s work. This could include anything from brand book run-throughs to getting an in-depth client history from the appropriate SME.  

3. Assign a Buddy

Finding or assigning an onboarding “buddy” can help a new hire feel more comfortable as they navigate being inundated with new information. Having one similarly tenured person in their corner to answer questions can help a new hire feel more comfortable, like they have a friend in the virtual office. It will also help alleviate the confusion of sending questions to multiple people and fielding multiple answers. 

4. Check-In Often, and Maintain Continuous Contact 

As a manager, frequent communication will help a new hire build a connection to their teammates, and feel more comfortable coming to you with questions and concerns. 

Weekly check-ins are an easy way to accomplish this, as it acts as a virtual “office hours” where the new hire can ask questions about projects, processes, or just chat about their week.  

5. Don’t Overthink It

We’re all out of our depth here. Maintaining open lines of communication will be the best way to optimize your remote onboarding process. Ask the new hire where they think their first few weeks could have been improved. And if you think it’ll be helpful to others—have that new hire write a blog about it.

Early on, it was uncertain whether marketing was even appropriate during a global pandemic. But what we knew for sure was that any message needed to be empathetic first and foremost. Companies like Volkswagen, McDonalds and Audi modified their logos to help reinforce the importance of social distancing: Volkswagen moved the V away from the W; McDonald’s separated their golden arches; and Audi spaced out their four rings with the tagline “Keep Distance, Stay Together.” Those logo treatments were soon replaced by messages highlighting company values. From “Here to help” (Buick & GMC) messages and ones reminding people to stay inside and “Explore the great indoors” (Jeep), to commercials reminding us that “We’ll get through this” (Mazda), brands wanted customers to know that their company values aligned with what mattered most at the moment.

While empathy is important, it’s not enough. Investments made in marketing still need to be effective and drive results, especially during these times where marketing and sales teams are being asked to do more with less. Tried and true tactics like events and in-person sales meetings are off the table for the foreseeable future, and most of us are in the position of having to rethink entire marketing strategies.

In the spirit of rethinking, 90octane has dedicated the last six months to helping our clients work around and through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those efforts have led to the creation of new program types and new ways of communicating with customers.

With one client partner, we’ve worked together to create what we believe to be a particularly strong approach. We’ve helped Oracle place its focus on three strategies that are both empathetic and effective:

• Support, don’t sell.
• Invest in relationships.
• Help clients frame the new normal.

“As we mapped out these strategies, we needed to make sure they were effective. We also wanted to make empathy a living, breathing thing – where we’re not just saying it, we’re backing it up through action,” says Heike Neumann, VP of Marketing at Oracle.

Support, Don’t Sell

There is a big difference between clients who use tools like Oracle Eloqua for batch and blast emails and those who use platforms to create intricate and effective marketing programs. And as Neumann points out, “We have customers who have already invested in us. It’s our job to make sure they are using our technology to its full potential.” One way Oracle is doing this is through the creation of programs designed to make customers experts in their chosen platforms—so they become very proficient in Oracle technologies. “We believe that by creating super users, these customers become more effective in the technology they’ve invested in. And when they are more effective, and see a return on their investment with us, it reinforces that they made the right decision buying from Oracle.”

To help Oracle accomplish this, we partnered with them to create a two-pronged approach to educational content and assets. The first stream, called the Ignite Series, frames customer education from a discipline standpoint (e.g., B2B Marketing Automation, Personalization at Scale and Data Management). The second, the Spark Series, frames education from a topic standpoint (e.g., Targeting and Segmentation, Lead Management and Scoring). The goal of both streams is to create bite-sized content that is easy to consume and addresses topics aligned with problems facing Oracle’s customers.

Invest in Relationships

“We are doubling down on relationships with technology partners, agencies, and influencers” explains Heike. “While our first strategy ‘Support, don’t sell’ is about enabling our customers, we believe partners play a key role in taking this a step further. Our partners help our customers expand beyond our products – and help them operate at a higher level.”

An example of Oracle investing in and fostering important relationships is its “On the Fly” program, where partners, customers, thought leaders and published authors can post quick, informative videos. The program is designed to be offered from marketer to marketer and Oracle has created a platform where its partners can tell their stories—without being sold to. One such story was Randy Frisch, Co-Founder of Uberflip’s explanation on how to accelerate the buyer’s journey. “Our partners can help our customers see new and different ways to use our products” Heike points out.

Research is another important investment being made by Oracle to strengthen relationships. “Research is important because it gives us a look out to the future. What can be. What could potentially be our next endeavor. When you have your ducks in a row (research), you can better react to the unexpected – like what we’re dealing with today. Research partners help our clients get perspective on where things are moving, while at the same time helping us shape the future of our products/solutions” explains Heike.

For Oracle, the objective of building stronger relationships is to bring more robust thinking and problem-solving to its customers as well as educating and enabling partners to act as an extension of the team.

Help Customers Frame the “New Normal”

If companies can help their customers emerge from the current global uncertainty better adjusted, better informed and better prepared, everyone wins. “In addition to adjusting to what the new normal looks like at Oracle, where Sales and Marketing will be even closer aligned due to things like in-person meetings and events being canceled, we are focused on playing an active role in helping our customers shape their new normal” Heike points out.

So then, where to start? With Oracle, we started by trying to identify which customers and/or industries were feeling the biggest impact. While almost every business is being impacted by the global pandemic, retail continues to struggle. Prior to the pandemic, many larger retailers had digital transformation roadmaps in place, but COVID-19 forced them to be abandoned or at least significantly altered. In addition to adding new tech milestones like contact-free checkout, the pandemic has also forced retailers to move up digital transformation timelines. Heike explains, “To help these companies shape their new normal, we combine our industry experience with solution stories that enable customers to see past today.”

Focusing on the market at large, Oracle has created a Retail Resource Center. This content hub includes a learning library for current and relevant topics like: managing distressed inventory in uncertain times, making location planning a north star for store reopening, and even a checklist for reopening retail locations. Also included is a “Connect with Oracle Retail” area that focuses more on future planning. This section of the website is comprised of webcasts that paint the picture of what a successful future for retail could look like.

For as much as we don’t know what the future holds, history has taught us that uncertainty can also equal opportunity. Now is the time for companies to demonstrate their commitment to their customers. Showing your customers that your goal is to help them identify and meet their new goals strengthens trust and reinforces that they’re not just buying products from you, they’re investing in a partnership.

We believe marketing investments should be accountable, and data helps us get there. Before we can assess an investment we need to understand what we’re measuring and, more importantly, why. On top of this, we need to analyze the data, not simply report on it.

Running marketing based on data and analysis is not a new approach, but still, many businesses don’t distinguish between reporting and analyzing.

What is reporting?

It is great that a business tracks performance reports and reviews investments, but this is not enough. Pulling a report is easier than ever. Most platforms such as social media, web tracking, CRM tools, and marketing automation tools have pre-built reports and, in most cases, we don’t need special expertise to pull them. Reporting is as simple as pushing a button in many cases: a report turns raw data to information and displays “what happened” or “what did not”, it does not tell “why it happened”. Understanding the cause & effect is critical, and often overlooked.

The need for analyzing

Analyzing moves beyond reporting. It requires exploring the data and pulling insights and stories; deeper understanding of targets, behaviors, needs, and so on. The goal of analyzing is to identify meaningful insights – understand why something happened and any associated outcomes. Finding the hidden patterns to drive future recommendations.

For instance, we monitored key conversion KPIs for a client in a seasonal business and by digging into the data patterns, we were able to understand the customer’s purchase behavior better, specifically we were able to determine a standard time period between customer engagement and purchase. Knowing this timeline then helped us to adjust our marketing plan for campaign communication and also create new marketing materials aimed at shortening the time period to final purchase.

We can utilize analytics to improve each channel’s performance across marketing funnel stages. By closely monitoring the KPIs in awareness, engagement, and conversion stages to make sure our campaigns are effective from the top to bottom of the funnel. If the numbers are not exactly what we expect, we ask why, review the strategy, and look for an opportunity to optimize.

Analytics at 90

90 was founded on the idea that marketing should be measurable. As a result, we tightly monitor campaign performance and involve analytics at the core of programs to assure we create accountable and insight-driven marketing plans. We use dashboards that are designed to visualize data in the optimal way to facilitate exploring the stories behind the numbers, using these insights from the dashboards are the goal of our analytics process.

Let’s analyze it together.

See how we put our plan-for-planning into action virtually—and why all future planning sessions will be stronger for it.

So much of finding your own creative space is about finding the right headspace. In some ways, working remotely allows for easier mental breaks, or to get a needed change of scenery. It can be easier to break out of the typical patterns of work to try to approach a problem differently. It can be easier to focus when interruptions are less frequent. Individually, personal productivity feels as good – or maybe better – in a remote world.

But creative isn’t just about productivity – it has always been a team sport. While individual perspective and talent are a critical piece of the puzzle, the collaborative act of challenging an idea – of looking for a better solution than the obvious – is critical to progressing both the work and the people who make it.

HURDLES: It becomes much clearer how important micro-interactions are to making good creative when it’s harder to have them. The little asides that happen over lunch or at the end of a meeting. Unthought of combinations take shape or new ideas spark from things that start as jokes. It’s harder to just spontaneously chat with your creative partner about those fleeting ideas.

TIPS: Creative partnerships can be harder to maintain with distance. Long the center of creative development, design/copy teams use each other to vet ideas and build upon a particular direction. Having more frequent, even if short, brainstorm sessions with a partner becomes more critical when done remotely. We’ve seen teams set recurring morning and/or evening sessions that make it possible to explore an idea together, then make individual progress during the day, and revisit that progress together again. Frequency seems to be the key to compensate for proximity.

The other aspect of collaboration that requires more commitment is, ironically, spontaneity. Setting recurring brainstorms or check-ins can help move things along, but when an idea strikes or makes a significant turn, getting input or sharing that idea in the moment is important. Calendars be damned when a great idea happens – make a call, send a message – share the spark. Getting excited about an idea and building momentum as a team is as important as having the idea in the first place.

We’ve also seen people cultivating some the “between” spaces before or after Zoom calls. Is your meeting waiting on an attendee to get started? Bounce something off a colleague. Has another meeting ended earlier than expected (when does this happen)? Ask how someone is feeling about the work, or where their head is at. These little moments are important to feeling connected to people you trust. They’re also the keys to maintaining a vibrant creative team culture.

Thanks for tuning in. If you’re finding new ways to create as a team, let us know. We’d love to hear what is or isn’t working about remote creativity.

Rely on first-party data 

Use clients’ first-party data to inform marketing strategy. First-party data is the information that companies collect from their online and offline sources. The most common types of first-party data is obtained with explicit user consent from a company’s website, app, CRM, social media, or surveys. Working within a privacy-first environment, it is important for companies to uphold privacy standards to maintain consumer trust and sustain consumer engagement overtime to maintain database growth.

Foster strategic partnerships 

Establish new partnerships with publishers who have privacy-first solutions in place that maximize the value of data without risk

Develop and adopt strategies for channels and ad formats that are inherently cookie-less.

Tribe audience building: Shift towards characteristic-based targeting (vs. demographics-based targeting) to target users based on online behavior and interests as opposed to age, income, etc. This also allows marketers to develop smarter messaging strategies that resonate with a greater customer group.

Offline moments: Don’t focus solely on customers’ online behaviors; look to offline moments that may be influencing their decisions. Then, use those moments to predict which marketing initiatives will be the most engaging to your audiences in the current environment.

Future-Proofing

Partner with Google to stay updated on discussions around specific changes. Actively ingest new forms of data to supplement cookie data including CRM data, cross-device data, and email lists. And, proactively prepare audience lists for a simple translation into Google IDs.

What Our Media Partners are Saying

We’ve had the opportunity to survey some of our most trusted media partners on how they’re preparing for the shift. While no one knows for certain what the future holds, these partners are prepared to use this change to their advantage.

When asked about the demise of cookies one partner said, “We believe that the move away from cookies will actually be a positive change for online advertising. Cookies are a somewhat antiquated technology, and while it will require some extra work and re-engineering of our systems, we think the post-cookie world will open the door for better solutions than exist now.” Another partner spoke to the issue of simultaneously providing consumer privacy and attribution tracking as a top concern moving forward. They believe that “advertisers and ad tech partners need to be dynamic and build solutions to still support measurement, attribution, and smart media buying while still respecting the privacy of consumers. Tailored digital advertising isn’t going away – but the mechanisms users to deliver it are changing to incorporate better privacy and choices for consumers.”

When asked about future-proofing, many partners spoke to the importance of leveraging first-party data and taking preemptive measures to secure and organize this data. Outside of first-party lists, one publisher spoke to current strategies that are completely non-reliant on cookies: “Outside of our rich predictive contextual strategies, we have invested heavily in channels and data sets that are non-cookie-reliant; digital out of home, mobile, connected TV, audio, macro data sets like weather, financial, social, location data, linear TV data, etc.” Another partner has already begun leveraging first-party data as follows: “We utilize what we call a direct match with other first-party data, where we match with the registration data from companies like IRI, Mastercard, Experian, and over 40 others. This allows us to identify the same person in our registered data as in theirs. We can then target that individual based on all of the attributes that we have them directly match to without the need for any cookies or modeling of data.”

Across all channels, partners believe reliance on device ID-level data is a logical next step for marketers, stating, “although CRM data has shown to be effective, we think that the new “post-cookie” world will basically have a new identifier (probably device-level) that enables us to match past online behavioral patterns with targeted ads – much like the cookie used to, but in a more secure and improved environment.”

Advertisers and ad tech companies alike agree that the prioritization of consumer privacy will ultimately allow for more precise targeting to consumers who desire to see relevant advertising. No one is certain what is in store for the landscape of digital marketing, but we believe this change is for the best.

Interested in learning more? Let’s talk!