Marketers are tuning their targeting strategies for a 2025 where cookies remain in limbo, media mix modeling (MMM) usage expands, and experimentation with AI continues.
"Because we have a more robust view of our first-party data, we have more insight into our customer groups," Moitree Rahman, senior director first party data strategy of the Eli Lilly and Company, said on a recent episode of our "Behind the Numbers" podcast. "Taking that insight and translating that in our external targeting strategy has also been a key innovation because we're not necessarily depending on probabilistic models, but now we know more about our own customers through our own direct relationships with them."
Here are three factors that marketers are weighing when building their targeting strategies for 2025.
Crumbling cookies
Even though Google shifted course over the summer and announced that it would not deprecate third-party cookies on Chrome, marketers see a landscape where the value of cookies continues to rapidly deplete.
"We've been preparing for this cookieless future working off of the perspective that identity is the new marketing currency and investing in a people-centric world identity strategy so that we can thrive in that potential cookieless world," Echo Sandberg, chief brand officer of CP Skin Health Group, said on the podcast. "And this has involved us working to build comprehensive views of our users through zero-party data like brand surveys, first-party data like our CRM [customer relationship management] database and even second- and third-party sources."
Measuring illiteration
With decreasing reliance on cookies and increasing privacy regulations, measuring through MMM has become a more valuable tool for many over the last year, and the trend is expected to continue.
"[We're] leveraging that MMM data heavily to initially decide where and how we would want to participate in different channels and also leveraging specific measurement and verification to ensure that we're helping to improve and we bring in our agency partners here to help us improve the sources of data verification … to make sure that we're getting the most out of our investments," Sandberg said.
Age of AI
Future targeting strategies must now consider how to effectively employ generative AI (genAI). Using the evolving technology for personalization, aggregating data, and gaining better insights has already been a priority and it will impact next year's targeting strategies.
"It's a space that we're really leaning into and our approach by and large has been on building an internal AI suite that we can be comfortable and a safe place for us to all work in," Sandberg said. "So many options and clearly a lot of oversight needed, but the ability to get from A to B much quicker and then to work with that data in a different way, it allows us to spend our time in the right places."
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