How will you reach your audiences?

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Good morning, Marketers, and how do you plan to reach your audiences?

I think it’s fair to say that marketing is at an inflection point — and that goes for advertising and publishing too. The days of taking customer data for granted are rapidly coming to an end in the U.S. (they were over in Europe some time ago). Not only are we saying goodbye to third-party cookies — which are already extinct for much of the internet — but it’s likely brands are going to have to take seriously the idea of getting explicit consent to capture first-party data too.

First-party data is valuable, usually accurate, and creates an opportunity to market to customers already engaged with you at some level. But it also reduces reach, and it creates the challenge of resolving a series of first-party identities across channels and devices. What I don’t know is how successful the probabilistic attempts to match first-party data with other data via various forms of identity graphs will prove to be in the long term.

A year from now we might have some idea of how this is all going to fall into place for the industry. Of course, if Google pushes back third-party cookie deprecation again, a year from now we’ll still be waiting.

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Kim Davis

Editorial Director

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.