Cookie crumbles — Era of CDPs begins
The death of the third-party cookie has been touted to be an ominous affair, and the general perception surrounding it has been that of the inevitable. The digital marketing space was abuzz after the Google announcement, following in the footsteps of earlier decisions by Safari, Firefox & even Microsoft’s Edge. Now that it is clear that this is indeed happening, it could be a blessing in disguise. There is no need to mourn the loss of the third party cookie, its demise had been foretold and anticipated for some time. Google’s announcement just hastened the inevitable.
Ironically, the “sudden” death of the third-party cookie has been long time coming.
First-party vs Third-party
Most browsers come packaged with developer tools that let you explore these cookies, and web interactions surrounding them. On the Chrome browser, one could do this simply by launching the console using Cmd + Option + I, then navigating to the Cookies section under the Application tab.
These cookies can either be set by way of javascript snippets inserted using Tag Managers, such as Google DTM, or by embedding a pixel gif (a 1x1 image) on a content section on your website (most commonly, headers or footers). Whatever the implementation may be, they are essentially doing the exact same thing — set a cookie, collect information using it & exchange it with a tracking service. Most ad blockers and do-not-track tools work by identifying this mechanical signature and intercepting them.
Every site uses pixels in one form or the other and marketers & product teams rely on them for delivering the most relevant and consistent omni-channel experience to their users.
There is a wide variety of martech products that either source and/or activate data that’s collected using cookie mechanics. For instance, a CRM (eg. Hubspot, Zoho, etc) is primarily a first-party data store, while a DMP is another kind (eg. Salesforce Audience Studio, Oracle BlueKai, etc) that activates audiences, transacted in a third-party data marketplace.
Enter Customer Data Platforms (CDP)
CDPs started to evolve from a need to bridge the gap arising out of various customer attributes residing in a steadily increasing number of data silos. These include systems such as, but not limited to, enterprise data warehouses (EDWs), CRMs, email campaign systems, website analytics, MDM, transactional and dozens more. It was becoming increasingly challenging for the marketers, and product teams, to first, identify, and then, know their customers.
CDPs solve this problem by coming packed with the following features, with varying degrees of flexibility around them.
Data integration — Ingest and process varying volumes, velocities and varieties of data
Identity —Stitch and enrich identities sourced from different systems into a master ID
Customer 360 — Build a single unified view of the customer with hundreds of attributes
Segmentation & Activation — Create audience pools with similar personas and push them to outbound channels
At Quaero, we are all too familiar with these problems, and that is why we built a PaaS product that becomes the mission control for customer data for disparate teams within an enterprise. This acts like connective tissue to enable people-centric marketing. Customer Identity, is at the core of it.
Identities pose a unique challenge — as a user, how I identify myself may vary from one website to another, or from one social network to another.
A unique characteristic of the Quaero CDP is that the platform is deployed inside the enterprise infrastructure, in a private cloud or an on-premise datacenter, using a fully containerised Kubernetes architecture. This provides it with access to rich and owned first-party data, which is usually seldom found outside the confines of the enterprise infrastructure. Since the software is completely firewall-ed off from the outside world, the enterprise data remains safe in-situ.
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In a series of articles following next, we will go through how a modern day marketer can navigate the landscape of identity driven & machine learning powered customer engagement. Stay tuned.
