My take on data-driven marketing

We’re nearing the end of 2024, and since 2020 or 2021, it’s been fairly obvious where we’re headed. Let’s look at some facts.

Firstly, privacy laws and the crackdown on big tech have gradually reduced the value of cookie-based tracking. Legislation like GDPR and changes such as Apple’s iOS 14 update have made it harder for businesses and other tech companies to track user behaviour. Many of the larger tech players are now working on or closely observing how they need to change their operations to adapt to the depreciation of third-party cookies and the new privacy-driven landscape.

The challenge at hand is that cookies have long served as a key identifier for individuals online—or a great proxy, so to speak. They’ve allowed unified targeting across channels. With this capability disappearing, the big companies are pivoting to build direct relationships with users and encouraging them to stay logged in across platforms.

Without cookies, tech giants can no longer track users across the web in the same way. To maintain visibility, they’ve incentivised as many brands as possible to adopt methods like server-side tagging or CAPI. This approach is critical to retaining insights on media targeting and performance. Without it, media and marketing investments could lose their edge.

Understanding the Shift

Let’s take a step back to explain. Companies like Meta and Google placed their cookies on countless websites, driven by the popularity of tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Tag Manager, or Meta’s tracking pixel. This enabled these companies to act like omnipresent observers, creating detailed profiles for each cookie and selling insights through targeted advertising products.

Now that cookies are disappearing, the challenge has been to find new ways to observe user behaviour across the internet—preferably as close to personalised, one-to-one tracking as possible. The solution? Leverage businesses themselves to provide data. Enter server-side tagging and CAPI. Instead of silently observing user behaviour via cookies, tech companies now have businesses report back user actions, like purchases or specific website interactions.

How does this work? Businesses are encouraged to identify visitors to their digital properties. In exchange, they get clearer visibility of their media performance, while companies like Meta and Google retain the ability to build user profiles. This has led brands to incentivise users to identify themselves—through personalisation, loyalty programmes, and discounts.

The Evolution of Loyalty and Identity

This shift has driven the growth of brand apps and loyalty programmes. These tools provide a way to collect data in exchange for a better customer experience. The data businesses gather is then fed back to platforms like Meta and Google through anonymised identifiers. While the process adheres to GDPR, it replicates the purpose cookies once served: tracking user behaviour, albeit with users now “wearing a mask.”

In some ways, we’ve gone full circle. Yet, this time, users gain something back. Beyond GDPR’s rights to know and delete their data, users can now trade their identity for tangible benefits like discounts and personalisation. This trade-off is slowly reshaping the marketing ecosystem, balancing power between businesses and individuals.

Adding an Identity Layer

Broadly, this transition is adding an identity layer to the internet. Governments are also playing a role, introducing legislation and pushing for greater oversight. For instance, there’s a growing trend to weaken end-to-end encryption in messaging services under the guise of safety. While exchanging privacy for security is a questionable trade-off, it illustrates the broader push towards identification in the digital space.

The key takeaway? Businesses and governments alike are incentivising users to share their identity. The number of anonymous web sessions is shrinking, replaced by increasingly personalised interactions.

What Does This Mean?

As we touched on earlier, loyalty programmes and digital experiences are evolving. Imagine a world where your entire online journey is tailored to you. On a golf equipment website, for example, your experience might include products based on your past purchases, geography, and skill level. It could even suggest your next golf game or offer a VR simulation to help you improve. The possibilities are as broad as your imagination.

Restaurants could present customised menus reflecting your taste preferences—or ones designed to challenge them. Larger brand collaborations could result in entire ecosystems of services adapting to your preferences, creating a truly one-to-one experience at scale.

A Glimpse of the Future

With the rapid development of AI, this vision could soon become a reality. Personalisation may go beyond simple recommendations to dynamically tailored websites, apps, and even in-store experiences. It’s an exciting, albeit complex, build for businesses. But the potential is immense.

As brands increasingly collaborate and share data, we’re on the brink of creating hyper-personalised ecosystems. Imagine a cluster of related products and services all centred on your unique preferences. One-to-one at scale becomes not just a possibility, but a standard.

Closing Thoughts

The future of data-driven marketing is closer than most people think. We’re witnessing the convergence of identity, AI, and personalisation in ways that will fundamentally reshape how businesses interact with customers. The question isn’t whether this will happen—it’s whether we’re ready for it.