How will Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies reshape the future of digital marketing? Marketers face new challenges and opportunities. Let’s talk about the impact of this shift on social media marketing, the complexities of targeting and tracking data, and the broader implications of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). With emerging trends like AI, micro-influencers, and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns coming to the fore, it’s clear that adapting to these changes while maintaining authenticity and trust in B2B relationships is crucial for staying ahead. Watch the entire video here.

In this episode, we dive into the seismic shift in digital marketing as third-party cookies crumble and data privacy laws tighten. Join industry experts as they unpack the challenges and unveil innovative strategies to keep your brand ahead of the curve. If you’re looking to stay sharp in the evolving landscape of social media marketing, this is the conversation you can’t afford to miss!

Full Transcript

• Hello, hello and welcome. And you can see I’m in a different office today because I’m with my mate, who I’ll introduce properly in a minute. So today, this live is really focused on something that’s coming over the hill, looking at the changes in third-party cookies, and what that means for social media because it’s going to have an impact. In case you didn’t know, Google was going to kill off cookies, and then they decided that they weren’t going to go for the full depreciation. And most specifically, they’re talking about third-party cookies. However, they are going to offer consumers and users the ability to opt out, and that is likely to have quite a large impact. So that means it will impact all of our advertising and all of our targeting, and of course, it will be an important part of what’s going on in social because cookies have been a cornerstone for all our targeting, tracking, and measuring.
• I am delighted to have Paul with me, Paul Collier, who’s the CMO at Funnel Fuel, who has been spending the last year really exploring what this is all going to be. In a world which is very uncertain, the changing landscape, you are the expert. So, we’re going to have a bit of fun. As you can tell, so we are going to dive into the nitty gritty. I want to set the stage first.
• For years, we as marketers have relied on cookies for ad targeting, tracking and using these little data packets, whether they’re pixels, which you’re used to hearing about around some of the social networks, or cookies themselves, they’ve been crucial in helping both our platforms and us as marketers develop profiles of our audiences, enable us to do personalization, precise targeting, and, of course, measure effectiveness. But with this fragile demise that’s really on the cards now, we know that consumers are more guarded, and the latest research from Forrester shows that this that consumers are more than 45% of online adults are likely to be taking steps to limit the data that they share. And we know that Chrome which is now going to offer the opt-in, opt-out element is 65% of the browser market.
• This is going to have a really big impact across the board. But I wanted to just narrow this down and talk really about, where does this impact social media marketing? Is it going to impact what we’re charged for, advertising, all these things? Let’s dive into it. Paul, my first question is this, Google sort of, we’re going to get rid of cookies. We’re not going to get rid of cookies. But change of heart. How are you seeing the industry react to this?
• I think my first comment when I first saw this was, oh, what the heck’s going on? This is, in my mind, not a U-turn. It’s not a not a reversal. It’s a redirection. When you think about what they’re actually doing, and I’ll get to in a second, the industry reacted straight away, and as usual, naysayers wanting to rush to the 24-hour news cycle, some really big news in the industry going well, this is it. This is the end. We’re going to go back. It’s all going to be okay. And there are those who may be a few hours later, the next day, the next morning, who are a little bit more informed and considered with their opinions, who said, no, this is just a different route to the same outcome.
• Yeah, what Google has done, in my mind, is seeded, and I think smartly so have seeded the decision, the inevitable decision to refuse cookies and the tracking and all the privacy stuff that goes with that to the user, as other parties have already done, and in doing so, it removes any inspection or review by the authorities and regulatory bodies about their market power, because they’re giving you a choice which is smart, and I don’t blame them for one second, the result will be the same. And so, the industry will have those people, and I’ve been learning a lot in this last year. We joined Funnel Fuel because I was consciously, willfully ignorant in my career, and I’m learning how much I didn’t know and still don’t know. But Google has actually given that power to the users, and whether it’s in your consumer life, in your business life, you know how often you go, no, I don’t want it. Don’t want and I’ve actually now like an anorak the first time. I’m not a technical person. You know that very well. Some of the people who are listening and watching might know me well enough to know that I’m not I know spend a little bit of my time commuting, clicking into who. Keys. What are they doing and how long do they have to hold them?
• Yeah, it’s actually, now I’m saying no all the time, until I say, actually, no, I do want to know what you’re talking about. I’m prepared to give you my information over so I will say, I will say yes on occasion. There are definitely two streams in the market. Yeah, the more informed are going. It’s not changing. The way in which it materializes is changing, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. In terms of, my mind, the whole sort of digital landscape of digital supply chain cookies is just one issue, but it’s an important start of the conversation. It is because I think it’s fundamentally, it’s taking the rug out from beneath the feet of marketers. I know that you’ve been working with B2B marketing to benchmark how B2B brands in particular, in this case, in this instance, are prepared for the shift, this shift in data, are they? Have you got any data you can show, but even say aware first prepared? Is another conversation.
• So yeah, we’ve got in market survey that’s still live right now. Check this morning. I think it’s going for another probably 10 days. Have you got a B2B marketing net, or even on the funnel fuel website, you can get a link to go into that and participate in the survey. I’ll put it in the comments. Top line. There are a few dates because I’m going to really apologize for doing that, but my attention span for this stuff is top-line at the moment. And these are just kind of top-line figures. They’re not final. We haven’t obviously finished the survey. The report was in process, and there’s a couple of real sort of dichotomies here.
• In excess of 70% of the audience who responded see limitations in targeting and difficulties in tracking. 62% are concerned about issues around transparency, control, and compliance. 40% have not yet started implementing any strategies to adopt. 56% are somewhat confident in the ability to navigate, kind of counterintuitive. But that’s surveys, and again, it’s not finalized yet. 36% are not yet exploring alternatives in targeting. She just goes from one side of me, I’m aware and then 66% identified limitation of resources, which I think is crucial.
• Yeah, it’s awareness, awareness-informed capability to then act, and that’s where we’re going to be. Because no one knows this. No one really understands so some really niche experts in how this stuff tech works both in cookies themselves, as well as across the entire digital supply chain, programmatic advertising, it’s actually quite an art, trust me, I’m not the expert in that area. I’m kind of at the top end of it. The one thing that struck me at the moment, and some of the stuff, I got back from the B2B marketing team, and I take a breath, 60% of the audience who responded are not exploring new advertising platforms beyond the traditional giants in place at the moment. At that point, the blood drains from my face. Wait and see the results. We should have the final output with the research, I’d suggest the third to fourth week of September.
• So, ages ago, you compared this to GDPR. Do you think? Do you think marketers won’t do anything until their results drop off a cliff? Because that’s what’s really going to happen, isn’t it, the results are going to do you know what? And yeah, that was an analogy. When I first sat down with Dan, who’s the CEO of this company, and some of the team members and co-founders, I had to I’m simple, and I put things into experience. I’m not technical. And I suddenly sat down and said, well, hang on. I had absorbed what I thought could happen, worst case scenario, Doomsday, and I was then reminded of the experience. I went through GDPR very quickly. We have limited time. I was head of a marketing function and sat on the board of leadership. One of my team members in one of my regions came to me. So, there’s this legislation coming up. It’s in the major organizational structure, you need to pay attention because it’s going to limit our key functional capability going to market to generate revenue.
• Okay, what is this? And it was a very rough outline, when’s it happening? Oh, next year. Okay, come back at the end of the quarter. And it kept getting pushed out that and that, that GDPR, got pushed out another year, so that individual knew not to come back to me, until at which point my radar, my strategic radar, went more than three quarters, and then I was already aware. I didn’t understand and comprehend, I went through a learning curve for that individual, and she knows who she is, so I still thank her for it. And then when I was aware, I went to comprehension and understanding, and then I had to accept it. There’s a phase you go through in human behavior. Once I accepted the potential negative outcome, I then had to internalize it and go, right.
• Actually, this was an opportunity. It’s an ugly opportunity. Your data is going to get completely shot to pieces. The German boss said to me, we’ve been there before. We throw out 95% of our data because generally, we’re five years ahead of the curve. That worried me, but then I accepted it, and then I did something about it. Yeah, started the process late, like everyone else did, but that process and that experience is how I equate to where we are now. Yeah, we’re aware of it. Do we understand it? Once we understand it? Do you comprehend it, and then do you accept the issue? If you do, you’ve got to go do something about it, surely. And I’m seeing, I’m talking to many people who are aware and I’m still trying to understand the details. I accept it. I’m that’s my job at the moment, and I’ve come to this company because I’ve gotten on board with this one, and there are still quite a few people who do not want to go to that level of acceptance, because they need to do something about it, yeah? And there’s a high level of ignorance, so that comprehension still to go, to be gone through. So that’s where I get the GDPR analogy from. So, to your question, I sincerely hope we don’t do the same thing, because we should have learned from GDPR.
• Yeah, and because this is so much worse in a way. Because, yeah, yeah, here was legislation that went through from a fairly consistent basis across how many countries and then, similarly, applied to America laterally. But it was consistent. The outcome of this entirely possibly could be completely inconsistent and create a much broader set of issues than just one final, excuse me, one broad brush legislation. Now, a lot of this is supposition, and think maybe, but we should have learned from our behavior in challenging our circles around GDPR. Don’t do the same as you did at GDPR. Or if you did it really well, you acted on it, great. Apply that thinking to this.
• Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, just pulling it back to social. How are cookies used in social for targeting?
• So, at the moment, it’s a piece of tech that, as you enter that platform, via the browsers, etc., enables that platform to track and monitor. Using the word carefully track is very important, in reality, your behavior on the platform, and also offer platform across other domains, once you’ve left for a period of time and again, when you look through the cookies that you’re accepting, check the number of days those cookies and the companies from all over the world. If you read a bit of a mail or online article, you see the number of companies from all over the planet and go, what the heck are they doing this for?
• Well, there are reasons for that and the period of time, so when you’re on that platform, and subsequently for a period of time when you’re off the platform. And so they can gather data, and then they can sell that data as a persona, as an insight, as a behavior, set to advertisers, to researchers. It’s monetizing people’s activity behavior. That’s the sole reason these companies exist. And equally, if you’re a brand, you own the website. You want the same technology applied so you can monitor, track assess and service more adequately, more appropriately, your engaged users’ platform. So that’s, that’s the very basics of it.
• Yeah, no, just because it was really interesting at the B2B ignite event I attended. The question went out, you know, are you using third-party cookies? Well, everybody who’s advertising is using third-party cookies in one fashion or another, even if they’re not doing so directly themselves. Yeah, and it was quite interesting, how many people said they weren’t until you said, talk to them and said, well, you realize, if you’re advertising, you’re effectively using third-party cookies. There’s also another element to the change in data, which is going to be the algorithm. So, you know, we have a beautiful thing in most of our social networks they’re effectively walled gardens of first-party data. So, in channels, advertising is not quite so deeply impacted by this.
• However, it supplements the data, for instance, in Facebook, by the Facebook Audience Network which will be impacted, which is the cookies that sit all around. So, you know that thing where you go to a website and maybe look at, you know, some face cream, and then suddenly you go back to your Facebook or Instagram or threads page. Well, not threads anymore, not yet anyway, but you go back to your Facebook or Instagram page, and then there’s an ad about face cream. And you think that’s weird. How did it know? Well, it knew because it went and got those cookies from over there. So, there are likely to be some algorithm changes, because there’s going to be a reduction in the amount of data, I think, and so what we’ll see is things like behaviors and preferences will need to be bolstered. So, I suspect, and again, don’t know this categorically at this stage, but what we’ll see are the social networks asking us for more information, and they’ll do so through polls and quizzes and tracking what we look on Instagram reels or wherever it is, and they will use that to help bolster it. They’ll also very likely use a greater amount of AI in order to make predictions so that companies who advertise with them get the best opportunity to target the right audience. But it does mean that I suspect over the next year, we’re going to see a lot of algorithm changes which is always a joyous thing.
• Yeah, I think to that point, and this is where I kind of take the wider stance, and this process, has enabled me to take a step back and look at other vehicles, as well as what’s going on in social and current tools that, if you’re thinking about, you know, the people that run those organizations, they are trying to monetize and create value, they can then monetize and sell, because that’s their revenue stream. And so if a portion of the intelligence and the material that enables them to create a persona and sell that behavior as a revenue stream, if a portion of data is going to be removed because cookies no longer allow third-party cookies, then they’ve got to do they’ve got to work harder to create the same value over a period of time because it’s diminishing returns exercise because these things age, this data ages. So, it’s like data starting to age, because there are no longer cookies being accepted. How are they going to get the data quality up? They’ve got to create more engagement in your pool, polls and services. But some of those socials won’t, don’t do any of this because they’re actually transactional.
• Yeah, they are. I mean, a couple of the key ones, you know, and you and I shot at this Twitter. It’s not a relationship, it’s a transactional tool. They are going to have to work much harder, work to great, create more data, create more value than just well, earn these cookies. So, I think they spend a lot of time, and I hope it’s not solved by AI, because that just frightens me, as well as a consumer and somebody in business. But what are they going to do to engage me, to allow me to go, Okay, we’ll give you my data. Massive question marks over that, but then you’re going to get more discreet or more clarity in terms of walled gardens of data and experiences to enable those users to say, yeah, you can have my data for a period of time.
• It’s going to be an interesting evolution. What it also does, I believe, if you’re looking from a marketing point of view, and you had a conversation a week ago about this, and I kind of test you with my theory, and I speak from my experience, do a marketing plan and put something into market, and you do, here’s the social version, A, B and C, here’s the channel version, the indirect channel, here’s the direct channel and one of your colleagues on another call recently accused us of being a bit lazy, and I kind of bulked up that. And I thought, no, actually, that’s right, we have been lazy as an industry, both from the client side and other parts of the sector as well. This opportunity to take a stop and go, if this is going to start to happen, I need to look for alternatives to bolster, to augment, to add to the current portfolio of in-market activities, because we could see things demonstrably changing from the negative, they may be less effective. They may very well be more expensive.
• Yes, right. There are two spectrums. They are becoming more expensive now because there’s 40% less of the marketplace available because Safari and iOS turning their cookies off. That’s been proven. So, everyone’s going for a market that’s only 60% of the available targeting in individuals than there were two years ago. So, it should be a catalyst. People go, okay, that’s going to start happening. I need to look around at other things to add to my go-to-market activities, other channels, as well as the social stuff, as well as the direct stuff. So, we’ll get into the omnichannel.
• Yeah, I think there’s an opportunity. It’s a risk, but you’ve got an opportunity as well. Yeah, and if you do it in a test-and-learn fashion, it should. I mean, I guess social has an advantage in the sense that it does have first-party data, but, I don’t think that’s the only answer, because exactly as you said, As a consequence of that, the very few estates out there that we can, we can get out to market with, are going to have first-party data, which means that anyone that does have it is going to charge a premium, so suddenly everything is going To get more expensive. The other side of the spectrum is, then what you’re investing needs to work harder for you, and that really leans on the need for greater creativity. Talk to me about that side of things, which is, really, we’ve got away with a lot, really, haven’t we as marketers, yeah. And it won’t get back to that.
• I’ve used the term where I was consciously ignorant for many years because it worked right. I gave my agency or my direct team, who are in control of channels, we did a campaign or go-to-market exercise, and it was version and whether it was owned and delivered directly for me with my inhouse resources, whether it’s down by an agency, etc., I would go into the boardroom and the website was doing this, and at the end, money was coming in the back door. And being very simplistic, of course, there was always cause and effect to the point I could measure it, and you can always measure right. And I remember specifically one time when that didn’t happen because I didn’t know what had gone wrong. And it was an issue with it was actually a paid-for advertising test that we did that just failed. The provider of that test said, no, no, we give you all the clicks, etc. Nothing happened behind and that shook me, and I think that’s what triggered me down this path from a personal, professional point of view, which is that potential, I believe.
• My experience is very much more likely to be happening more times in the future, because things may not work as they used to. It may not just work as well as we used to do that. So, I think there’s an opportunity there to just take a look at where are other vehicles, there are other opportunities to get into the market via mechanisms that we may already be aware of but we may not be brought to bear in our professional capacity, when I talk about omni channel, etc. And so that’s going to be an interesting version of marketing for next year, the year afterwards, which is, you may have a campaign, but I believe there’s a potential for you having to develop specific campaigns. And I mean specific campaigns, even from a creative from a version, from a message, from an execution point of view per channel, yes, not versions specific because if a social channel or an owned publisher creates a wall garden and a technical mechanism within their own wall garden, which of course, they’re going to do, because if you only you measure it, you monitor it, you can sell it.
• That’s the issue. We’ll go back to GDPR. That was a broad brush, standardized consistency. This could produce, it will produce elements of data, or the way you interact, how you interact, which format, which technology you use, and all of a sudden, there is the worst-case scenario. And I don’t want to be a dooms Doomsayer, Doomsday. I don’t want to be too negative. You could have to do separate campaigns, or discrete campaigns for specific platforms.
• Yep, and versioning is taking a new meaning, and that’s just me going with a better understanding of who that audience type is with what first-party data there is, how you interact with Twitter or Facebook will be different from how you interact with Wall Street Journal or whatever social and then the other piece in all of this is, and get to the other piece, which is, and I’m experienced as a consumer, and it used to annoy the heck at me, but there’s a convergence of B2C and B2B. My name has already been accepted. I am one of his old, funny who does certain things with business, certain things from pleasure, COVID and all of our lives crashing together, has brought those technologies together, from a technical point of view, but from a user point of view, it’s brought the acceptance of those messages converging. So, I’m now okay and probably professionally intrigued that I have powered my wife called me the front lounge, as we call it, a couple of months back, there’s an advert for you from Netflix. She was watching my account. Yeah, some fantastic documentaries on my list, I suppose, and an advert for social media, and advertising technology. That’s not me. Yeah, on a Sunday afternoon, that used to annoy me now, like that’s smart, yeah.
• So, there’s other social tech. And I would say, do we have to redefine what social is? Connected, TV, audio, and radio, then you move into a digital out-of-home. Yeah? You know, we did a test. It was a bit of a test of B2B ignite this year, where we did out-of-home advertising in context people to and from that event a few years back, you kind of gone. I’ve done a few posters. Look at the Spanish exercise, yeah? Now you can link that in as an alternative or an add-on to this standard social stuff, omnichannel. So, there’s a real potential to take this chance and go, let’s just re-look at everything, yeah, and get creative. And rather than go, Oh God, it’s going to get I think there’s an opportunity to go, okay, so we could just start afresh, couldn’t we? Let’s throw the rule, yeah, before it gets thrown at us, yes, by two companies. Yes. Let’s redefine the rule book on our own part, and in some cases, the risk from those companies, and look at other alternatives.
• Spot on. And it’s really interesting listening to you, because when I set up IF, 20 years ago, when I set up immediate future, there wasn’t any of this tracking. I wasn’t it wasn’t any advertising, to be honest with you. But you know, as it evolved, one of the really interesting things is the first part about a social network that was the marketeer’s amazing opportunity was the fact that we cluster around interests and behaviors. And on each channel, it was very different. So, you know, on Facebook, you threw sheep at each other. You know, on Twitter, it was, it was a cheap way of doing SMS when you had to, for those of us old enough to remember your paper text. But the point is your behaviors clustered around things. You were no longer just a demographic. You were not a 50-year-old woman living in the South of England. You were passionate about knitting or mad about gardening, or into your cars or whatever it is. You know, all of these things became much more important. We need to start to think more around those clusters and context and then, as a consequence of that, do that within each channel, and we’ve been advocating for years now, which is B2B. It’s not just LinkedIn. We got amazing results and attributed a pipeline of 38 million from a 12-week campaign running for a B2B tech brand on Facebook. I mean. Yeah, what else can you say? You could still do it.
• Remember a conversation we had in another office I was working in seven years ago? You talked, and I was the CMO regional VP, and you came to me about the C suite and Facebook. And I just, I remember, 18 months later, picking up the phone, I’m going, I think you might be right about this. And then we had the phrase, we came, I just write it down, micro influence, yeah, the mass market, even within B2B, let’s do an ABM campaign. I’ve seen ABM target accounts that are in the tens of thousands. Well, that’s not ABM, that’s just marketing, right?
• Yeah, and I’m not criticizing anybody, because some companies got orders of that big. But when you get into the fragmentation of the potential to identify target address and let’s not the measurements, another issue as well, because that’s changing, and that adds to this situation. It’s going to be islands of opportunity, yeah, and that’s why some of these new technologies and the new emerging ways of identifying people are not one solution. Companies like Funnel Fuel can do this, well, we’ve got a plethora, a mosaic of identifiers, an ID graph to identify, first, your target with all of these other partners, and they all participate. And it won’t be one broad brush answer. There’ll be points of my one then terminated again, micro influencers. So, you have to consider and think about it that way. Yeah, potentially, but you’ve got, you’ve got to actually rewire or take your brain back a little bit in a couple of in terms of the years, we maybe have been a bit lazy. We’ve certainly been ignorant. I have certainly been ignorant. And so, this is a potential bit of a wake-up call about what we may have taken for granted, certainly from a client, or advertiser point of view. I know I did because it worked. So don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t wait for it to come to you. Don’t be part of the 60% who are not exploring that. Frankly, still, I suspect that number is even bigger, which worries me.
• Yeah, so, and we might not know the outcome, where it’s going, , but if you’re not exploring this and going right, what are the plans and strategies, then you’re kind of going to always be on the back foot. I’ve just spotted it. We’ve got a little comment, and please, please ask questions you can do so live, and we’ll try and answer them live as well. As you read that question out there somebody that spoke at the Ignite event, and they said something really quite telling, because the response was, if you don’t start doing this, if you don’t start considering or exploring, your competitors will Yeah, you have to assume you have to do it, and you’re seeding. And the individual real estate with me, they said you’re seeding market share to your competitors. But I get the point. Yeah, don’t get cool looking down at your neighbors.
• So, this is a comment. I think that this will require us marketers to work faster and so generative. AI adoption will be higher to support creating more compelling messaging and brainstorming engaging content to boost those social engagements and continued nurturing. And I think that’s really what we’re getting at, which is thank you very much for that, which is that you do, we are going to need to be more creative. However, I’m not 100% convinced, having worked every single day with AI that AI is our solution to this. It may be able to help us cut a few corners, maybe do some of the research in the background, the heavy lifting work.
• Not to go too loud and hard on this one. I think AI has a very, very strong place and power within the ideation, the research and the early stages of anything from a creative amp, yeah, get-together. I was looking at something today as I was doing some research on another piece here, and there was this thing that popped up on my thing LinkedIn, I’m already now consciously tuning into whether is or not AI on LinkedIn, and because I can see there’s a flickering in the individually move, whether that’s the film, right, or whatever the technology is, my first response is, that’s AI, and I literally banned, blocked it straight away, yeah, because I find it offensive that someone’s used AI to give me a marketing message. It’s inauthentic.
• In the consumer world, there’s a lot of pushback in some of this, and B2B will be the same. Take it so far and use it for what it’s good at the moment but understand what it is not good at and what it’s very limited. And there are some really good case studies, and people are getting serious trouble for not in this area, but in legal in the US, for example, there’s been a few problems with people getting fired and getting fired, but they’re using the tool, and they’re taking it too far down that process of professionalism, and they they’re getting found out through ignorance or through nefarious or situations the has its use without question, yeah, but don’t, don’t, don’t forsake creative. Don’t forsake the human, the human element in that the personality of your company, the authenticity and the knowing your customer as well knowing your audience.
• So, talking to yourself, your customers know your personality, right? And so, my hope, I don’t believe it will ever replicate that entirely. As soon as you get into a situation with a customer thinking, is that really you, or is it the digital you, you have a major issue, especially in B2B, trust authenticity breeds a lot of very strong ongoing relationships and business. So don’t, I would say caution AI being used too far down that process.
• Totally agree. Let me bring this back to the cookies. Oh, dear. The team event has stopped broadcasting for me. I’m so sorry, working at this end, I think we’re still broadcasting. I’ll have a look at that, and we will definitely post this.
• So, there are some solutions. It’s not all dire. There are some and we know that there are things around contextual targeting, which we’ve mentioned, some privacy-preserving, sandbox things. What’s your take on these alternatives and also how, you know, just without, you know, pushing you to help, what’s the funnel fuel take on this?
• I think the key thing is, when you know the sky’s not falling in, don’t worry. You know, the cookies in the current format will still be around for a period of time, but again, it’s incumbent on you as marketeers to look for alternatives and be ready for a change coming, whether it’s next year or 18 months away, it’s going to happen, and start thinking and planning accordingly. And in that situation, you can guarantee, if anything, anything in technology, where there’s a problem, there’ll be a solution. It’s either been developed or it will come out of California or the Far East, or even London, in terms of startups, and there are a lot of very smart companies and very smart individuals producing technology that can operate in terms of targeting and identifying individuals to a point definitely, to a degree, rather than a specific individual level, in some cases, far better with better results than the current solution. And the sort of basis of that which funnel fuel exists is if, underpinning all of that, we touch on the analysis and the metric side, as well cookies, use of one part of this ecosystem.
• You have a complete underbelly in technology and piping, of what are terms of digital landscape. I’ve nicked that from a client organization where I spoke to a year, year ago about what they were doing about this, and they smartly, and they’re a big company, said, we get it. We’re bringing everything in-house, and we’re modeling everything ourselves. We’re taking control of our digital destiny. And I just thought, that’s really smart. Funny enough the person that joined as the company’s next Google executive, and so they use the word digital guests. I thought it was a fantastic point. And I took that to the digital supply chain because I need to be simple about this. After all, it’s very technical, very, very complicated in terms of how it works. It’s all predicated on a B2C background. It’s the internet, if you work in a B2B, that kind of makes it work. It was made to work for us. The final few tech people and the co-founders realized that having come from publishing in tech and now myself, from the client side, we believe we could do better by producing a tech stack that is B2B orientated, generated and created for B2B purposes. And part of that is the identification of the individuals or groups or companies or at companies at the moment, and you can go to another level based on behavior at a later stage. Then you use the appropriate technology, the omnichannel technology, within the right context, whether you’re going to work versus going to the shops in the afternoon, Saturday, Sundays, etc., overlay context with other channels and other vehicles, so you actually broaden your capability to engage with that individual. And then, crucially, we’ve also developed analytics, because the current analytics package we all live and breathe around is not fit for the u to be purpose. It’s a B2C package. It’s a B2C tech, and it doesn’t work. I’m sure people have been through the pain this year in comparing this year versus last year, and everyone does the same thing or rolls their eyes, even in the digital teams, just look down at the table, because it’s brutal at the moment.
• So ahead of that even happening, before the team were really consciously aware of that, they wanted to develop their own analytics package. So, we’ve done that as well. So, the reality is, we’ve kind of developed our own digital supply chain, omnichannel, cookieless and an analytics package at the back of it. So, we are one of those. Providers in specific B to B media, and tech, and we’ve done that in mind of the three stores of our potential audience, our agency, networks, or agencies who supply and work with a B2B clients. We have a B2B client direct business as well, and publishers. So, we’re working with three ends of that spectrum, which is equally important, because if we just because you need to, we need to, if we’re doing the supply chain, we need to work in all parties, yeah, rather than just at one end or the other. I’m not criticizing anybody, because the organization’s industry has grown that way, and it’s done very well, but there’s an opportunity to do better. We believe we can. And so far, business is good.
• You know, I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? You can look at this as, oh my god, everything’s changing, and I think I can understand it. If you’re in a marketing team where your resources are tight, which we’re seeing resources, it can get. Marketing can be quite exhausting at the moment because we have so many agility requirements, I get it, however. You can also look at this as a really massive opportunity to really get back to some marketing routes, yeah, and get back to really considering what your messaging is going to be, considering to which audience you’re trying to appeal. Really getting into the heart of what we do as marketers, really, I think.
• And I think to that point, you had a, you know, one of the biggest catalysts in the last 10 years, let’s be very clear, was COVID, right? And the landscaping business and marketing for everybody worldwide, in all industries changed. So, we had a bit of an oh, what the heck moment, and we had to do things differently. And so, a lot of stuff had to be completely re-engineered, both budgets, resources and how things got done. And there were some fantastic creative examples that were a direct result of the unknown, unprecedented, really scary challenge that created everybody. I saw some great stuff coming out. Some of these seminars I attended last year, again in the B2B sector of the organization. And you’re thinking, you know, when the questions are asked, the individuals in this interview can use some grease? Master, yeah, right. And there. And if I was in that CMO role, now, again, having done the COVID, the GDPR thing, having gone through COVID, you are going, yes, we could do right if we got through.
• I mean, this is not going to be that big a deal if you let it not be that big deal if you don’t deal with it. If you take Gardner’s figures, I think there’s a report 18 months ago, you know, in market delivery of a message typically between, I think it’s 58 and 62% of the budget that’s spent is done so via a digital mechanism. And you might not be thinking, but I’m going doing advertising over there, and my social and my Google search, no, all the other activities you’re getting into markets and digital channels, the digital supply chain. So, it’s pretty fundamental. Make mistakes, yeah, and take the opportunity to take a step back and go right. There’s an opportunity to really rethink this. Yeah, let’s get creative, and let’s not wait for the thing to change around us. Yeah, let’s get ahead of it. Some of it’s going to work. Some of it there may not be a solution for so wait and keep an eye and monitor it.
• So, we talked a little bit about cost, but we know that privacy is going to be even regardless of this, we’re going to have challenges around privacy, aren’t we? What do you where do you think it’s going? I know I read out that Forrester insight saying 45% but I it feels that feels very low, doesn’t it?
• With all due respect to Forrester, I think that’s under calling it by about 50% there’s some great data in a couple of the online research tools that have up-to-date data based on the records of opt-in and opt-out on iOS. They’ve done this situation, I think about 18 months now, maybe two years. They’re averaging 75% opt-in to 96% opt-out. That is intuitive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now, and that varies considerably. And when you dig into it is fascinating. I’m not a stats person, but I do find behavior interesting. When you dig into it varies quite considerably in a margin of 10 or 15 to 20 points based on the geography, the business segment, and the type of activity, gaming versus social, versus whatever it is, and then by country. And you can look at different countries, and the polls can be very, very so if you’re I can’t remember the data points, but if you’re in a certain sector, in a certain country, you might have a much greater risk of everyone opting out than another, and it’s worth again, doing the research as to history doesn’t always tell you what’s coming in the future, but in the absence of anything else, it’s a pretty good yeah. So, with respect to Forester, that percentage, I think, is intuitively, very low. I think if you’re looking at a B2B point of view, I would expect it to be an excess, you’re going to have to assume that’s going to happen. Because if you assume that you are prepared, you will benefit by being prepared. If you don’t, you don’t get prepared, and you think it will be okay, you may have a big issue coming up.
• So where, where should marketers start? What are the, you know, just in your experience, have you been exploring this a lot longer than the rest of us? You know, where, you know, we’re all sitting here going, Oh God, we’ve got to deal with it. What do I do? Well, so what are the, what are the strategies?
• Yeah, and I think this is, again, this is the point where we’re at the awareness stage as an industry, and I in, we talked earlier on about some of the people I talked to when I first got hold of this subject, with guys at funnel fuel, and I had to go through that process. What did I not know any of this? No, I didn’t, and I really didn’t need to know it. And when I played it back, perhaps when I got it wrong. Now I know, I think I know why. And I went through a period of I went to loads of research. I went out to the industry. You were one of those individuals I talked to and said, I think this is happening as a client-side marketer, this is what could happen. And you went, and your team kind of, yeah. And I spoke to other people, your peers in the industry, and a lot of people going, I know about that, but what are you saying is actually going to so we’re at the awareness stroke, understanding stage of this, and it’s been accelerated recently.
• News comprehension and understanding are really a crucial part of accepting it, that curve is going to come very, very quickly, and the willingness to accept it, I hope part of our job is to just push that forward, rather than not kick it down the alleyway, don’t push it to long grass, because it will come. It’s going to happen. And so the first thing is self-analyze. Just go through your own your own beliefs, your own values, as to do I really understand this? Do I truly? And it’s really hard to sit in the boardroom the leadership team go, you talk about, you know, it’s easy when it’s a consultant, as I am, I go in and say, I’m going to ask all the dumb questions because I can and you can see the room going, but now you’ve got to go through, as a leader in marketing, or even if you’re part of the digital team, take the opportunity to go, I’m going to do this year, and really dig into this as my person, my team member in the UK, the team at the company I worked with, the GDPR, she took on herself to assist me, the ignorant dinosaur at the top of the chain, to assist me in going down that path, because she knew she understood she was ahead of the curve.
• And then when I got to the point where I got it, God for that. Here we go. And it was really quite an interesting process to go through. So, you know, take a look at everything you’re doing and take a look at it from a different lens. Yeah, are we now? Are we who, with whom, and how? And what does that mean? Data, process and some of this are going to be uncomfortable. Some of this is going to be challenging from a company point of view, the people that you work with within your team, because there will be a level of ignorance that you’re going to have to accept, that you will we’re all complicit in whether your client, agency and or publisher.
• We’re all part of the same journey. We’re all part of what’s been successful, and we’re all part of what might not be successful moving forward. So, there’s no point finger pointing. We’ve all done well out of this. Yeah, we’ve all been successful at one point or another. Now things, the landscape is going to change, so let’s go through the process, and revisit what you’re doing with a different lens. Take a really good look at it, whether you’re running it directly, whether it’s with an agency or a third-party publisher, and ask those questions, what is it that you’re relying on in the digital supply chain? How are you doing there? Or how is that party doing it on your behalf? With quite a degree of an audit, as it were, and one of the things we’re thinking we need to be starting to do, and what do you need to get a little bit ahead of the curve, rather than, yeah, you know, a bit of insight and a bit of analysis of your own position, your own opportunity and potentially your own risk that you need to mitigate. And there are, there are organizations that can and will help you do that in some cases, because this is completely new, and we don’t know, let’s learn together.
• I was going to say I think the vital part now is to test and learn. We need to be checking and double-checking elements like the Facebook Audience Network are going to be defunct, I don’t know if they are, but if they are, then we need to look at alternatives. If they find an alternative, is it going to be the right kind of alternative for us? Do you know? I mean, yeah, all of these questions need to be asked, and now is a great time to test and learn. What would happen if we didn’t have access to this? What would that do to our numbers? How would we bolster them?
• If I were in a sort of CMO role at the moment, respective of the size of the company and the budget, I would actually first do that sort of probably quick in-house assessment, get a litmus test, get a feel, a barometer, and then given that, I would make a. Prediction that probably quite a few people go, Okay, we need to look at this whether you act on it right away now, but I would say you need a work stream on an ongoing basis, because this will flare up and come back down again. It’s not going to be consistent. Things will pop up solutions. There’ll be another investigation, Google or other parties may come up with another solution, yeah, and other wall gardens, and so you’ve got to keep this probably a level of consistent work stream through the next, I’d say 18 months. I think that is important. It has the potential to be that important, yeah. So, I would say, take a look, do an audit and analyze. Take a look at yourself and your organization, and how you get into marketing, and then you may go right. We need to sort it out right now. We’re overexposed. I didn’t know. Or we’re okay at the moment. We’ve got other things, but don’t walk away from that. Keep going and just keep an eye on it. When you come to renew your agencies, when you come to renew contracts, etc., apply this lens to that moving forward, as well as apply it to what you’ve already done. I think it’s that fundamental. It’s that bigger table stage, which is what I’m doing, what I’m doing with this company.
• Yeah, amazing. Thank you. Our time is up. We will republish this if it didn’t broadcast live. Thank you so much, Paul, as always, as usual, though, these new things, have brought up more questions. I think it’s of all the things I think I would walk away from this knowing, which is that I am now aware of what impact this is going to have, or an idea a fair understanding and that that means we, as you rightly say we can do something about it. So, I really think this is not the first time we’re going to talk about it. I think we’ll talk about it again, but I do believe that we all need to be very aware and ask those questions of our agencies, of the platforms we use, of our colleagues and peers within marketing. So, we’ll be back again, of course, with another topic, probably in early September now. So, look out for that in the meantime, thanks again. Paul, pleasure, thank you. See you all soon.

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