The death of third party cookies signals the return of proper marketing.

As the 'cookie' crumbles, we can all hope for a turn to the basics.

We are past the age of cogs and knobs, where the focus and the hard sell was always on the technology. With barely a mention of markets, buyers and well... you know, anything to do with the people we're supposed to understand and sell to.

And let's not even mention the woeful quality of digital advertising creative, it was the 'good enough' approach masked by the myth of supposedly scientific A/B testing.

Something that myself and Mike Taylor dismantled in our ‘Anti-personalisation’ piece.

All these things sounded so perfect, marketing reduced to a simple series of buttons and processes. A playbook that anyone could follow, especially for smaller businesses who didn’t have the budgets to compete with the big boys.

But - the ideology behind it, of over targeting and hyper data slice warehouse optimisation personalisationblah blah blah was demonstrably 99% nonsense.

And that's not to say these things didn't make money, they certainly did make money. And they were a huge game changer, I ran digital ads myself for years and I still do. And from what I found, it wasn’t really the cookies that made the difference, it was the very basics of effective media planning and great creative.

The job of 'targeting' may appear to be harder now because of the cookie apocalypse - but all that means is that people have to do the job properly, there are no more shortcuts that will allow marketers to jump straight into tactics. And there is certainly no more ‘it’s technical’ wool left to pull over the eyes of businesses.

The reason I have such a strong view of this topic, is that during a brief period from 2014 - 2020 there was a surge in ‘Digital agencies’ and the resulting hype led to an overfocus and overreliance on these suppliers to do the job of marketing.

And it worked, for a while. Even if the results were not there, marketers and agencies had a high degree of plausible deniability because they could demonstrate the complicated inner workings of the world of digital.

But in short, a lot of small businesses lost a lot of money to suppliers who overpromised and underdelivered. And a lot of that poor practice related to an obsession with third party data that was used for their targeting.

Data that largely turned out to be junk anyway.

There are no more half measures.

The full measure is -

🟣 Good customer understanding using qual and quant research.

🔵 Clear segmentation and targeting choices.

🟢 Strong positioning.

🟡 Media investment that buys ‘real eyeballs’ and focuses on context.

🟠 Brilliant creative that gets attention, gets remembered and gets reach.

🔴 Measurement systems that are build around incrementality and feed upwards to greater business objectives beyond ROI.

Better marketing, better business.

Think I can help you? Book a 15 minute discovery call with me here.

Things I do for small businesses (up to 250 employees)
+ Consulting
+ Marketing audits
+ Market and customer research, strategy and planning
+ Outsourced/fractional marketing manager
+ Marketing training for individuals and teams
+ Campaign planning and media management

Join me in London on 21st March 2024.

I’ll be speaking at an all day workshop 'How Brands Grow & Compete: Marketing Myth Busting With Science’.

We pull apart the common issues that stop marketing teams from doing their best work with a key focus on making sure teams are properly aligned.

This workshop is aimed at senior brand leaders and marketers and I’m on board to keep things practical.

There are limited spots for this workshop. But as a subscriber to my substack I wanted to give you a chance to get booked.

Max (Organiser and co-host) previously ran this event in Manila last year and got 9.3/10 ratings from the attendees. We talked about it and he said, hey - let's do this in London. So here we are, and we hope to see you there.

Want to know more? Head here.