With third-party cookies on the way out, brands are looking for new ways to future-proof their advertising strategies. Considering that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations and offers, you don’t want to miss out on the chance to connect with potential customers by losing the ability to personalize your ads.
Rather than wait until 2023 to test different ways of targeting audiences and customizing campaigns, it’s smart to look into alternatives now to ensure you’re well prepared. One of those alternatives sits with first-party data — a key component to developing and maintaining direct relationships with consumers and delivering personalization in a cookieless world.
Now, first-party data strategies may be feasible for more mature brands that have spent years building out their CRM databases, but younger, growing brands may not have access to robust stores of first-party data. In that case, how does one get started with first-party data alternatives to third-party cookies? Well, check out inventory packages.
What are inventory packages?
Inventory packages bring relevancy to ad experiences by targeting content based on context or within a specific vertical. For example, say your brand sells sporting goods and apparel. Advertising on sports-themed newsletters would allow you to advertise your products amongst audiences already keyed into sports.
The beauty of email newsletters is that they rely on a unique identifier, email, to reach people and don’t depend on third-party cookies for targeting or personalization. When coupled with inventory packages, email newsletters enable advertisers to target audiences in contextually relevant environments for added personalization regardless of cookie availability.
LiveIntent’s Curated Marketplace
Our curated marketplace is all about pairing programmatic media buyers with the right content or context in the form of custom and off-the-shelf inventory packages to help you achieve your personalization and campaign goals (even if your first-party data and third-party cookie “jars” are empty). With LiveIntent’s Curated Marketplace, you can access off-the-shelf or custom inventory packages, targeting inventory based on:
- Content: Content packages are comprised of newsletters or ad slots enabling advertisers to appear alongside specific types of content. Content packages consist of newsletter inventory tagged with the same IAB Category, like Business.
- Seasonality: Seasonal packages are composed of seasonal newsletters that produce seasonally relevant content, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, for instance.
- Above-the-fold (ATF) Content: ATF Content packages are inventory packages that only feature — you guessed it — above-the-fold inventory within specific content categories like ATF ad placements in Business newsletters.
With our Curated Marketplace, you can target audiences with contextually relevant ad experiences that can help move audiences further down the funnel to purchase.
Inventory packages in action
Imagine that personal-care brand Dove puts together several different creative messages to promote products that appeal to specific audiences, but it doesn’t have first-party audience segments for targeting at its disposal.
With LiveIntent’s Curated Marketplace, Dove can select from various packages to reach the right audiences. Dove’s aluminum-free deodorant might be of particular interest to those health-conscious audiences, making packages like Health & Wellness and Family & Parenting of potential interest for marketing their deodorant. A product like Dove’s quick-drying deodorant might land particularly well with those audiences who are usually on the go and tuned into Sports or Travel content. These approaches can help brands reach likely customers and drive conversions, even if they don’t have first-party audience segments with which to work.
Building first-party audience segments
LiveIntent can help brands build out their first-party data footprints and audience segments by leveraging inventory packages and our audience solutions. Here’s how.
Let’s say comic book publisher Illustrated Classics wants to promote a new sci-fi fantasy comic and, like the previous example, lacks a first-party customer segment to target. By partnering with LiveIntent, the publisher could target Science and Hobbies & Interests packages to reach a broad audience early on in their campaign. By implementing LiveIntent’s LiveConnect tags on their website, we could gather data on audiences clicking on the ads and converting online. LiveIntent and Illustrated Comics could then use the data to construct a seed audience to model a Lookalike Audience. Lookalike Audiences can help you find more potential customers because they look and behave like the people who’ve already converted.
Content, Context, and Relevance is Key
In short, delivering personalized, relevant ad experiences is key to your campaign success — whether the industry has access to third-party cookies or not. So, get started with new strategies and approaches to reaching your audiences with relevant ad experiences before 2023. You’ll be happy you did!
