Proving the Effectiveness of Advertising in the Post-Cookie World

Google finally started phasing out cookies. How will you measure brand and outcomes lift?

It’s a tidal shift in digital advertising. Last week, Google began its long-promised phase out of third-party cookies in Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. With privacy concerns at the forefront, the tech giant wants to enhance user privacy, but experts question if the industry is ready.   

This change raises crucial questions about how advertisers will measure campaign effectiveness. And since brands typically spend huge amounts of  ad budgets on digital media, demonstrating efficacy is mission-critical for marketers. 

This is where DISQO provides incomparable value to our clients. We help brands, agencies, and publishers to understand campaign effectiveness completely. What does complete mean? It means up and down the marketing funnel from brand impacts, like awareness and purchase intent, to performance outcomes, like search, site visits, and shopping. It also means omnichannel. No media channel is out of reach for measurement because our audience members give their consent for brands to understand their full journeys. The result is… our clients get better measurement than they ever had with cookies. 

What is a third-party cookie? 

Cookies have been the backbone of online advertising, and if you’re deeply enmeshed in advertising, you know what they are. Let’s level set for readers who may be among the uninitiated. Third-party cookies are small pieces of data placed on a person's device by websites when they visit them. With this information stored on the device, industry players from publishers to adtech vendors have been able to see portions of people's consumer journeys. Third-party cookie data has been used for targeting ads, delivering more personalized messages, and creating campaign efficiency.

They’ve also been at the core of ad effectiveness measurement, because with the tracking they enabled, brands could understand user behaviors online post-exposure to their ads. 

While it may seem like third-party cookies were a win-win for consumers and the brands that wanted to reach them, concerns about privacy and data security grew, prompting tech companies and regulators to take action. Every major web browser has already phased out support for third-party cookies, except for the giant in the space - Chrome. But in early 2020, Google announced its plan to phase them out, joining the likes of Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari in prioritizing user privacy. 

DISQO’s game-changing Brand and Outcomes Lift

DISQO, a brand experience platform, helps our clients to better understand their customers and prospects, and to comprehensively measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. We recognized the challenges presented by the phase-out of third-party cookies long ago and built a unique solution. 

Ad budgets are the most precious resource for marketers. They must be able to justify investments in each media channel and demonstrate how individual channels in their cross-media campaigns work together to drive brand growth and sales. 

DISQO’s Ad Measurement gives marketers the granular measurement they need by busting through all of the many silos created by media fragmentation. You can measure it all and most crucially… TV, digital, and social media – collectively around 90% of ad spend. How do we do that? 

Cross-device and cross-media measurement: DISQO’s platform can measure online behaviors that third-party cookies were used to track, like site visits and shopping, but we can do it better, capturing many other digital activities like search and connected TV viewing. For too long… advertisers have gotten different sets of campaign effectiveness data from their various TV, publishing, and social media partners. This gives them a vexing problem: adding together apples and oranges. DISQO solves this with one measurement platform and one methodology that is objective across omnichannel campaigns. No more complicated math. No more media partners “grading their own homework.”

Full-funnel measurement: With the advent of cookies, the industry also skewed toward looking at performance metrics (online behaviors) as the ultimate indicators of how campaigns are working. That was like covering up one eye and only looking at the short-term impacts of advertising. Behavior is important, but it’s also crucial to understand how ad campaigns impact what consumers think about brands. Our audience answers survey questions that supply these answers. With DISQO, for the first time, marketers are able to understand campaign effectiveness across the whole marketing funnel - from how ads impacted consumers’ thoughts and feelings to how they prompted specific behaviors. This is a game-changer for brands. 

Explicit consent: DISQO gets consumers’ consent to collect ad effectiveness data through clear and concise opt-ins. We ensure that all data collection and usage practices are transparent and compliant with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. This builds consumer trust.

High-quality first-party data: DISQO’s consumer relationships are 100% direct. There are no intermediaries. With our mobile, desktop and TV metering technology, DISQO collects high-quality first-party data directly, and this is what we use for complete and precise ad measurement that is not reliant on cookies.

Recently, we hosted an Ad Age webinar about the future of ad measurement, where our client, Ryan McManus of Inspire Brands (Dunkin’ Donuts, Arby’s, Baskin Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Sonic, and Jimmy John’s) had this to say about working with DISQO:

Connecting the dots between platforms is huge. If we're doing our job, we're providing an understanding of how advertising drives outcomes. DISQO is a huge part of that. We can start with our audiences, look across the different mediums, and understand the synergies across the whole campaign.

Ryan McManus Director of Media Analytics, Inspire Brands

More virtuous relationships between brands and their customers

Change is hard, and no doubt… as cookies are further phased out this year, advertisers will be presented with many challenges. Ad effectiveness measurement doesn’t have to be one of them. 

It’s been said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Complicated solutions will arise, but there’s an easier way. At DISQO, we simply and transparently ask people if they would like to share about their brand experiences. Many, many people say yes, empowering us to give our clients the intelligence they need to improve their ad campaigns – and to propel brand growth with people at the center of every decision. 

DISQO is reshaping the advertising industry in a way that is more people-centric. And our clients are getting better ad measurement than they ever dreamed possible.