In today’s episode, get to know our guest, Ana Milicevic, a thought leader in the marketing space. She discusses the importance of third-party cookies, how they are used to connect different entities, and how privacy concerns have led to them fading in the coming years. Listen in as we discuss the changes, including browsers being able to block or restrict third-party cookies and the effects on how browsers are becoming even more privacy-friendly.
Ana is an entrepreneur, media executive, and digital data innovator. As principal and co-founder of Sparrow Advisers, she and her team of strategic consultants work with companies across Adtech, Martech, eCommerce, and media on strategy, scaling challenges, product, go-to-market positioning, and new market launches, innovation, services, and global field enablement. Earlier in her career, Ms. Milicevic held key leadership roles across product, strategy, technology, and services in early-stage startups, high-growth scale-ups, and established global companies like Adobe and SAS. She is a frequent speaker on data management, cross-channel marketing analytics, customer experience, innovation, and emerging markets.
“I think that’s one of the universally recommended solutions for reducing one’s reliance on third-party data is great, just use first-party data. But for some companies, this is just not going to be a very viable strategy.” – Ana Milicevic
The use of cookies as a tool for advertising and tracking users has become more prevalent in recent years as advertisers have found ways to exploit vulnerabilities in web browsers to track users across different websites, even after they’ve logged out of those sites. This has raised concerns among privacy advocates that the use of cookies contributes to a “surveillance society.”
The impacts of the incoming changes are that digital advertising will no longer be able to rely on third-party cookies, and marketers will need to find a new way to target consumers. The remedies to these changes are for marketers to assess how they want to approach user identity, craft a data strategy, and understand how they will manage PII and non-PII.
There are various privacy and regulatory considerations in different regions. In Europe, regulators have been more stringent about customer data and pre-emptive protection of customers to limit the amount of data sharing. We have seen a distributed approach to data protection, with different states having versions of a data protection law. The advertising and marketing industry is stepping up to think of newer scenarios and how to make that value trade-off between, ‘Hey, you’re getting some fabulous free content here in exchange for some advertising.
Sunny Side Up
B2B podcast for