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In today's dynamic advertising landscape, media buyers must navigate a complex web of partner relationships, buying decisions, and shifting industry trends. In this episode of Adtech Unfiltered, Shelby Saville, Chief Executive Officer at Starcom US, shares valuable insights from her time serving as Chief Investment Officer at Publicis Media US.
Together with host Noor Naseer, Saville discusses her approach to partner engagement, what drives investment strategies, and how buying teams can adapt to stay ahead. Her candid perspective offers actionable lessons for both buyers and sellers looking to succeed in an ever-evolving ecosystem.
In a surprise announcement, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta will stop using fact checkers for content posted to Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Instead, they will be employing “Community Notes” akin to those used at X, where Elon Musk has outsourced content moderation to its users.
Zuckerberg and Meta’s new chief global-affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, explained the rationale for their decision in a blog post published January 7, saying the fact-checking program that they launched in the wake of the Donald Trump’s first election victory back in 2016 was "too politically biased" and had damaged user trust.
When it comes to the kind of content that Meta now deems permissible for posting on its platforms, the company has also updated its Hateful Content guidelines to allow users to post controversial and/or offensive content that was previously banned, including “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” The revised guidelines have also eliminated explicit mention of other previously-banned content, granting tacit approval to posts referring to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it.’”
In addition to the content moderation changes, the company also announced it would be updating its algorithms to once again prioritize political content in its users' feeds.
Together, these moves have the potential to transform the user experience on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads and have left both users and advertisers holding their collective breaths, anticipating the consequences of the changes while hoping for the best—and preparing for the worst.
Why is Meta taking these actions? Where to begin.
Per the company’s official position, “We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” said Zuckerberg. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Going beyond the company’s official explanation, Meta’s policy pivot appears to be motivated by a number of different factors—the most obvious of which is the incoming Trump Administration, as alluded to in Zuckerberg’s video message and affirmed by Trump himself at a press conference shortly after the announcement. Meta has had a tumultuous past with the former and future president, having suspended him from its platforms following the events of January 6, 2021, and is seeking to curry favor with the new administration.
Zuckerberg also made reference to his hope of working with Trump "to push back on governments around the world," specifically mentioning Europe and what he called its "ever-increasing number of laws" and "institutionalizing censorship." Given Meta's many legal issues in the EU, which have resulted in nearly 3 billion euros in fines to date, the callout seems especially pointed and could signal a new twist in the advertising industry's ongoing regulatory saga.
Meta also revealed plans to promote "civic" (aka political) content on its platforms after previously deprecating it back in 2021. This, too, is likely to appeal to the incoming administration, but it comes with an additional benefit: Political content tends to drive strong engagement, and the company may well be using this moment as an opportunity to re-prioritize these posts in users’ feeds to reap those benefits.
“Meta’s hope is that this change boosts conversation and engagement on the platform,” said Colleen Fielder, Group VP, Social and Partner Marketing Solutions at Basis. “If that proves true and time spent on their platforms increases, that could be a positive for advertisers.”
Additionally, Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s trust and safety team will be relocated from California to Texas, saying that it would “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” In truth, Meta is likely making the move for both optics and for cost-saving purposes, avoiding California’s higher taxes while catering to Republicans—who will now control both the White House and Congress—by relocating teams to a tried-and-true red state.
“From Meta’s perspective, this is potentially a win-win-win situation,” said Amy Rumpler, SVP, Search & Social Media Services at Basis. “Meta will benefit from cost savings and reorganization, the government will be appeased, and users will still have the ability to inform others if they believe content is misleading or misinformation. The key difference is a separate group of people won’t have the same amount of control around removing content they deem as inappropriate.”
The elimination of third-party fact checkers and weakened Hateful Content guidelines introduce new brand safety risks on Meta, threatening to exacerbate what has long been an area of concern (and source of criticism) for the social media giant. However, it remains to be seen whether this new system will be meaningfully different (or meaningfully worse) than the old one—at least as far as advertisers are concerned.
The risk, of course, is that a rise in harmful posts could mar the experience of using Meta's platforms—and, in particular, Facebook—to the point that users flee, further accelerating social media fragmentation and undermining one of marketers' most reliable resources. But for many advertisers, Facebook and Instagram remain essential channels whose reach extends to virtually every audience, so until there is a user exodus, most marketers will stay put, instead keeping a weary by watchful eye on how things develop.
Crucially, Meta also noted that, unlike X, they are planning to focus on maintaining strong relationships with advertisers and that they have empowered advertisers with brand safety tools to navigate this new environment.
“Policy changes aside, they do still have a brand safety system in place which allows advertisers to avoid alignment with content that falls in specific categories of sensitivity—which, if advertisers aren’t already using by default, they should consider implementing now,” said Rumpler.
Additionally, the re-prioritization of political content on its platforms—likely fueled by both a desire to appeal to Trump as well as the knowledge that this content drives especially high engagement (and that it did so during the previous Trump administration)—could provide Meta with an engagement boost that attracts users and, at least temporarily, intrigues advertisers.
Altogether, in the short term, the changes are unlikely to change much for marketers, but the industry will need to pay careful attention to how users respond. While Facebook and Instagram are fairly ubiquitous, their new policies could lead to very different reactions from different communities across the US. Some groups may grow more engaged on Meta platforms, but others could feel alienated or threatened to the point that they leave Facebook or Instagram altogether. Brands should keep a close eye on how their audiences react in the months ahead, monitoring ad performance carefully while keeping tabs on engagement trends—and, of course, leveraging brand safety tools as effectively as possible.
If you’re a digital advertising professional (and if you’re reading this, we’re going to hazard a guess that you are!) then signal loss is probably top of mind as we head into 2025. While it’s true that Google no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, its new intentions to implement a consent-based model will pose similar challenges for marketers, with almost 90% of US browsers expected to become cookieless in the long-term.
For travel and tourism marketers who are already navigating a highly saturated market—and given consumers’ increased price sensitivity thanks to the tumult of the last few years—this mounting signal loss makes things all the more complex. As such, it’s critical that advertisers in the industry begin implementing and optimizing privacy-friendly solutions now, if they haven’t done so already.
For specific insights on how travel and tourism marketers can approach this transition, we spoke to Nicole Stahlecker, VP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis Technologies. With over a decade of agency and digital media expertise—and extensive experience in travel and tourism advertising—Nicole brings a wealth of knowledge to this discussion. Read on for her top recommendations for travel and tourism marketers as they approach privacy-first advertising in 2025.
Nicole Stahlecker: So many travel and tourism marketers are sitting on a goldmine of first-party data. The problem? It’s often housed in distinct platforms across tons of different third-party vendors, rather than centralized in a customer data platform (CDP). Because that data is so disparate, marketers can’t action it collaboratively, or easily confirm when and how consent for it was given, since different platforms have different levels of privacy consent. This becomes particularly challenging for teams operating internationally, and as a result, they end up using only a limited amount of the data available to them and actioning it on the strictest of levels to ensure they’re meeting all data privacy regulations and requirements.
Since first-party data will be so critical to getting personalized messages in front of prospective travelers as we lose more and more signals, finding ways to unify, organize, and maximize that data is absolutely key. To that end, there are two action steps marketers should take as soon as possible:
The first is to clean up existing data so that it’s organized and usable from a customer data privacy standpoint. This might include working with vendors and platforms to gain access to that data, and/or investing in a CDP. The second step is to come up with a plan for how to collect and house first-party data in a clean and organized way moving forward, so advertisers can use it in future campaigns.
NS: When it comes to cookieless targeting, contextual targeting is key for travel and tourism marketers. There’s never going to be anything that beats that age-old marketing adage of putting your message in front of the right person, in the right place, and at the right time, and when it comes to those objectives, contextual targeting never lets us down. For example, tour companies know that the people most likely to book a tour are already going to be looking at other relevant information for that destination. By placing ads strategically near content about that location (such as on a travel blog that explores best times to book for that destination), advertisers can ensure they’re connecting with target audiences at a time when they’re likely in a decision-making mindset.
When it comes to attribution, leaning on your historical data will be most impactful. Just like keeping your first-party data clean, organized, and readily accessible is going to benefit your team, so too will keeping track of your campaigns and their results. Even though you won’t be able to track attribution the way you used to as signal loss increases, you can compare your recent data to your historical data and make improvements based on that.
NS: Sure! First, let’s imagine you’re a museum, and you have one location in a single destination. When it comes to targeting, you might take want to advantage of geotargeted digital out-of-home ads to capture the attention of tourists who are physically walking around near your museum and might be enticed by these displays.
For larger companies, or those with a presence that extends beyond a single location, you don’t want to overuse geotargeting—and you certainly don’t want to assume that you know where your customers are coming from, as you might miss out on potential audiences. For instance, let’s say you’re a hotel with multiple locations. You would likely lean more heavily on targeting based on your first-party data by linking your data collection with your advertising platforms. This would allow you to both target people who performed specific actions on your site, as well as create predictive (AKA lookalike) audiences to find similar users. You’d then be able to target these audiences based on their booking history, other individual actions on your website, demographic information, and more.
2025 will be a critical year for travel and tourism marketers to implement and fine-tune cookieless solutions to connect with their target audiences. By focusing on collecting, storing, and intentionally leveraging first-party data, as well as harnessing the power of contextual targeting, travel and tourism marketers can find success in today’s privacy-centric digital landscape.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
Retail and e-commerce advertisers have long depended on third-party cookies for audience targeting and campaign success attribution. After all, with so many product categories falling under the retail umbrella, and significant variation within each category (size, color, material, etc.), marketers needed a way to target audiences with personalized ads for specific products and to then measure the impact of their efforts.
But with rising signal loss across the digital advertising ecosystem, retail marketers must shift towards privacy-first advertising strategies for targeting and attribution. This will be especially important in 2025, with Google appearing set to implement a consent-based model for cookie-based tracking in Chrome. Even though Google has walked back its original plans to deprecate third-party cookies, this new model is expected to have the same consequences for advertisers.
In this context, retail and e-commerce marketers must adapt by building expertise in cookieless solutions, prioritizing first-party data, and adopting automated targeting and measurement methods. But what exactly should those efforts look like? Below, Andrew Barbuto, Senior Agency Lead at Basis Technologies, highlights industry marketers’ top considerations and challenges amidst signal loss, explores potential solutions, and provides examples of privacy-first approaches for different types of retail businesses that can lead to advertising success.
Andrew Barbuto: I’d say there are two major considerations. The first is the ability to target to serve personalized ads. Because of signal loss, advertisers must change the ways they track consumer interests, behaviors, and habits.
Then there’s the measurement of that advertising. Part of the value proposition in digital advertising has long been the ability to tie an individual impression to an action or an acquisition. Without the volume of cookie-based signals advertisers are used to, that’s going to be a challenge for a couple of reasons. First, view-through conversions will go away completely, which will impact almost everything except the click-through conversions. Second, advertisers will likely up their investments in retail media networks, as they have treasure troves of first-party data that can be used for targeting. However, the ways these networks attribute sales are siloed and not standardized, and the biggest players like Amazon and Walmart don’t have much incentive to share their data. That means that results will be coming in from a variety of sources, which makes it difficult to get a holistic view of campaign performance. Retail advertisers will benefit from considering solutions that tie all of these approaches together—tools like data clean rooms, CRM solutions, CDPs, and click-based conversion attribution systems will be key.
AB: Prioritizing the collection and maximization of first-party data will be key to success for retail and e-commerce advertisers. Marketers can collect first-party data through things like promotions and loyalty programs, and then utilize it to create those personalized touchpoints. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are particularly useful for these tasks, as they can organize first-party data for targeting, and help with attribution as well by giving marketers a look into the customer journey and what tactics were most impactful on conversions in a given campaign. Marketers can also use the cookieless analysis of a data management platform like TransUnion for lookalike modeling based on first-party data to grow their addressable audience.
Contextual targeting is another big one for retail and e-commerce. It’s particularly relevant because people are researching products, doing shopper comparisons, and reading reviews on their phones and desktops. To be able to influence them while they’re researching in a contextually relevant environment is well worth the investment.
Next, connected TV is a great, privacy-friendly place for retail advertisers to get premium inventory on private marketplaces, and it’s good for awareness all the way down to conversion. Within their creative, advertising teams can include a QR code, which customers can scan to go to their website. At the same time, they can be running a digital campaign with a similar message to reach audiences while they’re on their desktops or mobile devices consuming shorter-form content.
A few other solutions that come to mind:
AB: Let’s take a large sporting apparel retailer as the first example. They’d want to consider onboarding first-party CRM data into a CDP like LiveRamp for precise ad targeting that doesn’t require third-party cookies. Based on the data they gather about a given consumer’s shopping behavior, they can advertise to them around the web for repeat purchases, new products, or related accessories, across different channels like video, native, or display, from upper- to lower-funnel ad placements. They could also utilize a DMP like TransUnion, which also doesn’t rely on third-party cookies, to build lookalike models off their CRM data and deploy awareness advertising to obtain new customers. Last, they could send people to their brand website and retarget off that site, or they could direct them to a landing page that promotes sales at a retailer partner like a big box or sporting goods store—but, of course, generating traffic to your own site comes with the added benefit of potentially increasing your CRM pool.
For a retail business that has brick-and-mortar stores, a geotargeted campaign can target people in proximity of their retail locations in a way that’s not reliant on cookies. Then, advertisers can use a footfall attribution partner like Cuebiq to measure physical store visits based on advertising. For a more specific example within this category, let’s take a business that sells diamond products in different luxury diamond stores. Their target customers will do research online, but the majority of that industry’s sales happen in-person at their local jewelry store and not online. So, advertisers can target people with a combination of proximity and geotargeting, past website visits, as well as people who have visited a physical jeweler. The business could also switch its KPI from “website visits” to “in-store foot traffic,” which is where sales are more likely to happen and, again, isn’t based on third-party cookies for measurement.
Advertisers may be losing the signals they’re used to, but consumers will still become aware of products, visit brand websites and apps, browse options, buy online or in-store, and spread the word about their experience—good or bad. And they’ll still hand over email addresses and join loyalty programs in exchange for discounts, points, and perks.
With all that online behavior, retail and e-commerce advertisers shouldn’t dread the progression of signal loss. Contextual targeting, first-party data activation, and making the most of premium inventory on emerging platforms can provide a holiday catalog-sized array of options for privacy-friendly campaign targeting and attribution.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
We hate to say “restaurant and dining” in the same breath as “cookies going away”…but at least it’s only the third-party kind of cookies, right? While it’s true that Google has stated it won’t deprecate cookies in Chrome, its plan to grant users more control over cookie-based tracking is expected to have the same impact on advertisers.
Of course, this isn’t the only force pushing digital advertisers towards a privacy-first approach: Marketing teams have already had to deal with signal loss in recent years due to factors like Safari and Firefox going cookieless, the uptick in digital advertising regulation, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and consumer demands for data privacy.
To help advertisers find their footing amidst increasing signal loss, we called on restaurant and dining marketing expert Vanessa Allen, Basis VP of Integrated Client Solutions. Read on for her insights into navigating the landscape of signal loss, as well as her top recommendations for cookieless advertising solutions that can turn prospects into customers and visitors into regulars.
Vanessa Allen: In today’s digital age, signal loss is leading to an eroding internet-based identity. To mitigate this, my top piece of advice for marketers is to prioritize the collection and use of first-party data in a compliant, privacy-friendly way. The good news is, the restaurant and dining industry has several consumer touchpoints where businesses can collect first-party data: point-of-sale systems for transaction data, loyalty platforms for behavior and interest tracking, and reservation systems for timing and frequency of visits. Marketers can then use a customer data platform (CDP) to turn that data into audience segments for ad targeting and to find lookalikes of existing customers.
VA: In addition to first-party data, there are quite a few cookieless and identity-friendly strategies available for restaurant and dining marketers.
Contextual targeting provides a great opportunity to capitalize on clear customer signals. For instance, the person reading a blog post about the best restaurants in Denver will get value from seeing ads for dining options in Colorado’s capital, and the aspiring cook reviewing online pasta recipes might be convinced to order in from the Italian restaurant advertising its delivery options. Contextual targeting can be especially effective for lower-funnel activities: There’s a lot of intent behind researching menus and reviews, as people are viewing that content at or near the moment of decision. Another benefit of contextual advertising is that it tends to be less expensive to deploy programmatically than other solutions, but still allows marketers to measure lower-funnel metrics—like cost per acquisition to generate orders for fast-casual or quick-serve restaurants, or cost per landing page view for fine dining.
Geotargeting a relevant location is another cookieless solution that is ideal for prospecting, as it can make locals and travelers aware of nearby food and drink options. It can even cause a change in buying behavior, as advertisers can geofence their competition and advertise on their customers’ phones. For example, the coffee lover who’s in line at a coffee shop could see a geofenced mobile ad for a discounted drink across the street, which could potentially intercept that sale.
Attribution is changing because of signal loss as well, but there are solutions when all the stakeholders learn how to work together. For instance, businesses can share sales data with their advertising partners, and with the right formatting and FTP setup, that sales data can blend nicely with ad campaign data in the same dashboard to show how advertising efforts are influencing sales.
VA: Let’s take a fast-casual restaurant as the first example. To collect and activate their first-party data effectively, businesses can collect data at the time of purchase and send it into a CRM. That data can then be activated strategically based on dining behaviors—for example, fast-casual customers aren’t likely to dine at the same restaurant again for about a week, so they can be put into a seven-day lookback window. They aren’t targeted programmatically or on social media until a week after their last purchase, which ensures budget is spent efficiently. When they see ads a week later, they’re ready to buy again.
Next, let’s look at a fine dining restaurant. A marketer for this kind of business can generate awareness with location targeting, which reduces reliance on cookies, and census data, which can show customer affinity for these restaurants. Contextual targeting is also effective for finding people researching tentpole events like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, graduations, and other times when people might spend more money on a nice dinner out. If some of that research happens on more premium websites, a private marketplace deal can use a certified publisher’s first-party data to create interest with the right audience.
Ongoing signal loss, combined with Google’s plans to give Chrome users an informed choice over cookie-based tracking, means that the urgency around restaurant and dining marketers adopting privacy-first advertising strategies may well reach a boiling point in 2025. By collecting and activating first-party data and leveraging privacy-friendly media tactics such as contextual and geotargeting, industry marketers can place themselves at the head of the table.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
From Apple’s App Tracking Transparency to consumer privacy demands and resulting regulatory action, digital advertisers have grappled with widespread signal loss in recent years. But 2025 may bring even more drastic change in this area: While Google no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, its new user “opt-in” plans are expected to result in the same signal loss for advertisers. For healthcare and pharmaceutical advertisers, this shift will add yet another layer of targeting and measurement complexity to an industry that is already wrought with privacy-related regulations.
For insights and strategies to help health and pharma advertisers navigate signal loss, we turned to Katherine Mitton, Director of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis Technologies. Read on for her top recommendations on weathering the identity crisis.
Katherine Mitton: My biggest piece of advice is to set up systems that allow for the collection of as much HIPAA-compliant data as possible. If brands haven’t already invested in advanced customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and capabilities, that should be their top priority. Then, once they have those systems and solutions in place, they can shift their focus to building up their CRM list so that, once third-party cookies are completely gone, they can still understand who they need to target and build lookalike audience segments to extend that targeting.
Beyond that, it’s important for health and pharma marketers to maintain a mixed-funnel approach in their campaigns. When third-party cookies are gone, advertisers won’t be able to track their mid-to-lower funnel actions the same way they can now. Those mid-to-lower funnel tactics will remain an important part of a holistic media mix, but health and pharma brands will need to lean more deeply on historical performance to prove out their impact. We know that they work—we’re just not going to have the attribution for them anymore.
KM: Beyond leveraging their own first-party data and CRM lists, health and pharma advertisers have several other options for privacy-friendly targeting solutions. Luckily, advertisers in the space already have experience navigating a lot of regulation (i.e., maintaining HIPAA and OCR compliance), so there’s a level of comfort with alternative targeting and measurement methods that advertisers in other industries may not have.
One cookieless solution that will be particularly useful in the health and pharma space is healthcare provider (HCP) targeting. Now is a great time for agencies to communicate the benefits HCP targeting offers their clients and to bolster the partnerships that enable it. That might look like working with third-party providers that specialize in healthcare systems and targeting based on providers’ specific specialties. Or, it might include leveraging platforms like LinkedIn that allow job title-based targeting, which is another way for health and pharma advertisers to get their message in front of doctors and other healthcare professionals without using third-party cookies.
Contextual targeting is another critical privacy-friendly targeting tool. If advertisers are trying to reach patients via contextual, that might look like placing ads for their products or services alongside relevant health info that prospective patients will likely be engaging with. And if they’re trying to reach HCPs, that strategy might include targeting medical journals, medical resources, and other online medical content that appeals to the HCP audience.
When it comes to attribution, leaning on historical performance will be key for lower-funnel tactics where pixel-based attribution isn’t going to be possible anymore. Agencies will need to educate their clients early and often about the impact of cookie loss on performance measurement and lead the way in resetting expectations. For instance, if one of their client’s paid search ads historically drove a lot of conversions, an agency can encourage their brand partners to continue to invest in those tactics even if they can no longer show the same attribution. Additionally, third-party brand lift studies can be a helpful way to measure success of campaigns without cookies. These studies are privacy-friendly and, when used in conjunction with historical performance, can help agencies and brands evaluate their ad campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
KM: Let’s imagine you’re a pharmaceutical company with a drug that treats a very specific condition. Your target audience is already pretty small, and targeting patients directly is tough due to HIPAA and OCR regulations. Your best options would likely be to do some contextual targeting based on keywords related to the condition your drug treats, and to leverage partnerships that enable the targeting of healthcare providers who treat the condition your drug is tied to.
As another example, let’s say you’re an agency that works with a telemedicine provider. I’d recommend investing in some contextual targeting based on keywords and driving folks who see those ads to a landing page where they can opt in for more information. Once that’s done, you’ll have first-party data you can leverage to target these audiences with customized messages based on the personal information they shared.
With an abundance of industry-specific privacy regulations, healthcare and pharmaceutical marketers are navigating a complex advertising ecosystem even without signal loss. With the shift towards a privacy-first advertising model, these teams must get even more intentional about how they target and measure their ads. By investing in the collection and actioning of first-party data, upping their contextual targeting spend, leaning on historical performance, and leveraging opportunities like HCP targeting, health and pharma advertisers can make the most of their ad spend in a privacy-first world.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
Heading into 2025, financial services marketers face an unenviable list of challenges—from convincing people to borrow money at today’s high rates, to communicating product value and service expertise in an ultra-competitive market, to reaching and converting unbanked, underbanked, or alternative-banking customers.
Signal loss isn’t making things any easier, as Google’s plans to offer consumers an “informed choice” experience for third-party cookies in Chrome will ultimately pose the same challenges marketers expected with cookie deprecation.
But the financial services industry has proven resilient in the face of change. It’s better positioned for greater regulatory scrutiny. First-party consumer data is available, attainable, and actionable. And solutions abound for targeting and retargeting potential new customers and attributing their conversions—including inquiries, online applications, scheduled appointments, and more—to advertising campaigns.
To help financial services advertisers adapt to signal loss, we spoke to Julia Hewitt, Basis GVP of Integrated Client Solutions, to gather her top recommendations and insights.
Julia Hewitt: Financial services advertisers will need to consider how they’re reaching their audience online, which looks different today than it did five years ago thanks to cookie loss, digital advertising regulations, mobile ID erosion, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. Whether it’s through targeted advertising, organic content, or community sponsorships, financial services marketers need to cut through the noise to reach their ideal prospects at key moments of intent.
Then, once you reach them, you need to consider what you are doing to help them connect with your brand and, ultimately, entice them to provide you with some form of first-party data: If people are clicking on your ad or going to your website, what content are you providing? Do you have tools they can use—let’s say, to calculate the cost of a loan? Or to run comparisons with other financial services? Do you have a newsletter they can sign up for that includes information that’s highly relevant to them and their needs? These are the sorts of things that could generate an inquiry or an opt-in that gives you the data you need for targeting, personalization, and attribution.
Of course, the challenges that come from signal loss will affect reach and personalization. There are regulations that require you to comply with how you’re targeting people and how transparent you are with how you plan to use their data—we’ve seen it with programmatic advertising, we’ve seen it with Meta, and we’ve seen it with Google. As cookies and the ability to track app data fall by the wayside, timing and relevance get more difficult. But the good news is that, as an industry, we’re used to change. We’re used to adapting. This is just another wave to get through.
JH: Contextual targeting is a great approach for financial services marketers and brands to lean into. When people are researching homes and home loans, cars and auto loans, home or auto insurance, or credit card rates, they’re researching because they intend to buy, borrow, or inquire. Advertising next to this content can strengthen awareness or trigger a decision to click and engage with these financial services companies. A big thing with contextual advertising is identifying the content, keywords, publishers, and/or private marketplaces that will connect your brand with moments that are important to your potential customers.
And, of course, using first-party data is key. But to be able to use it, you first have to collect it. A company website can offer lots of places for that data collection, including inquiries, appointment schedulers, content downloads, or e-newsletter signups. The right martech can then help segment that data to apply it strategically so you’re not advertising retirement planning ads to 18-year-olds heading off to college.
When collecting first-party data, it’s critical to keep regulations and customer expectations around data privacy top-of-mind. Inform users about how you’ll use their data, and make sure they have access to your data usage policies to be compliant.
Finally, we can’t forget attribution, which will continue to evolve as we continue to lose signals. Google Analytics or other web analytics dashboards can help, and there are several other attribution solutions in the works (including from Google) that will replace the “cookie trail” from ad exposure through event-level metrics to conversion. Media mix modeling solutions can also help advertisers evaluate a holistic picture of the customer journey. There is no one-size-fits all approach, but relying on data to influence your digital marketing strategy can allow advertisers to be more efficient and effective.
JH: Imagine a financial advisory brokerage that needs more financial advisors on staff, so they might decide to advertise to recruit a highly qualified person to provide that specific type of service. They’ll want to set up their adtech stack to be able to measure and analyze click-through data from their digital advertising campaigns with tactics like granular ad tags instead of cookies, then determine the best-performing websites for ad placements and strengthen those partnerships.
A similar process could be applied in B2C marketing as well. Marketers could measure clicks on ads to identify high-performing placements and personas. Then, using machine learning and predictive modeling, they could locate those personas and others with similar traits, targeting products or services that align with their preferences.
There are also opportunities to use your website to identify specific audience behaviors and feed that information into a CRM for better segmentation. For example, web visitors might submit their email addresses when downloading an online guide to home-buying or to follow up on the results from an auto loan calculator. That can create first-party data sets that pull in more personal data. That category-level information can also enrich a person’s CRM record with zero-party or interest-level data, which can then be used for a more personalized, relevant ad experience.
While signal loss presents challenges for finserv marketing teams, implementing these recommendations now will help them gain a competitive edge against teams who aren’t as proactive. By collecting first-party data intentionally, strategically investing in contextual targeting, and leveraging data analysis for segmentation and optimization, finserv advertisers can achieve targeting and message resonance at rates that would make the Fed jealous.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
The next few years are set to be, shall we say, an educational time for marketers at colleges and universities. While Google no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, its new “opt-in” approach is expected to bring about the same challenges for advertisers. When compounded with the signal loss advertisers are already dealing with as a result of things like consumer demand for data privacy, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and the many privacy-related regulations that have cropped up in recent years, higher ed advertisers will need to shift towards digital advertising tactics that prioritize user privacy. On top of that, institutions will have to grapple with the college enrollment cliff, which promises to significantly reduce undergraduate enrollment starting this year, making it all the more urgent for colleges and universities to market themselves effectively and efficiently.
The good news? These massive upheavals provide a significant opportunity for advertisers to get creative and take a leading role in helping their organizations weather the storm.
To better understand what higher ed advertisers need to know about the privacy-first future, we spoke with education marketing expert Sydney Warden, Director of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis Technologies. Read on for her insights on how to adapt to signal loss and the cookieless future.
Sydney Warden: As advertisers lose more and more signals, collecting and organizing first-party data must be a top priority. As such, my biggest advice for advertisers in higher ed is to help their brand or clients get their first-party data in order.
I often see colleges and universities where their first-party data is spliced in so many ways: satellite campuses versus the main campus, online versus brick and mortar, and undergraduate versus graduate, to give a few examples. This can lead to data silos, where because of how first-party data is collected and stored at these organizations, advertisers can’t access it efficiently—or, in some cases, access it at all. Because of this, a lot of higher ed organizations are very reliant on third-party data, and that could present a big problem as cookies go away.
I also often see universities using third-party providers to house customer data gathered from website touchpoints such as registrations or newsletter sign ups. In those situations, advertisers aren’t even able to pixel those touchpoints, let alone access that data.
As a result, it’s going to be key for colleges and universities to start unifying all their data. Investing in a customer data platform (CDP) will be a good call for many institutions, as this can ensure that first-party data is collected effectively, unified, and organized moving forward. CDPs can also empower advertisers to maximize their first-party data for targeting and help with attribution by giving marketers a clearer view of the touchpoints in a consumer journey and how they contribute to enrollments or other kinds of conversions.
SW: Beyond first-party data, I think a data management platform (DMP) solution and contextual targeting are key for colleges and universities.
DMPs allow advertisers to place pixels across a website or on specific actions in the consumer journey, gathering insights into visitor attributes such as household income, gender, age range, and location, and then using those insights to curate anonymized customer profiles. This not only helps advertisers learn more about the segments they’re targeting, but also allows them to build lookalike models to extend that targeting to new audiences. This is all pixel-based, not cookie-based, so it doesn’t collect personal data and is privacy-friendly. In addition to targeting, DMPs can empower attribution in a similar way to CDPs by allowing marketers to get a view of the customer journey and showing which touchpoints are most impactful on conversions.
In regard to contextual targeting, advertisers can align with relevant content on websites or apps to serve ads in a privacy-friendly way. It pays to invest some time and money into figuring out what a target audience typically consumes and where they consume it, and then placing ads in that relevant content and on those relevant platforms to ensure the right audience sees it.
SW: Sure! For our first example, let’s take a mid-size or community college that has a more limited marketing budget. To make the most of their ad spend, I’d recommend leaning into hyper-personalization via first-party data, and focusing a bit further down the funnel via things like contextual advertising. For advertisers working for these organizations, it’s a good idea to have a curated list of local sites and contextual segments relevant to specific target audiences that they can build or tap into for their clients. As for the institutions themselves, they’ll want to work with partners who can offer those lists and segments.
Bigger and better-known universities that already have some brand recognition, as well as more funds for marketing, should focus more on upper funnel platforms such as CTV and social media to maintain their brand recognition. This is beneficial not only for brand awareness, but also for filling retargeting pools. Also, these organizations will likely find it easier to tap into their first-party data and use it to reach out to former students who may be interested in returning, or to build some relevant lookalike audiences for targeting.
Higher education advertisers can lead their colleges and universities to privacy-first advertising success by setting the right strategies in place. Investing in the collection, organization, and extension of first-party data should be top priority for marketing teams, while a DMP solution and contextual targeting will also be key strategies. By leaning into these recommendations, higher ed marketers can rise to the top of their class in 2025.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.
For nearly two decades, third-party cookies have helped advertisers understand audiences’ behaviors, create personalized advertising experiences to meet their needs, and measure the impact of their campaigns. But recent years have brought an increased focus on consumer data privacy—spurred by regulations and consumer demands alike—and third-party cookies are on the way out.
These pressures are likely to heighten in 2025: Even though Google says it will no longer deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, its new “opt-in” plans are expected to have the same impact on advertisers. The fact that almost 90% of browsers are estimated to become cookieless in the long term presents a particular challenge to CPG marketers, who are already contending with highly saturated markets, the explosion of private-label goods, and a variety of other challenges.
To help CPG advertisers navigate mounting signal loss, we spoke to Vanessa Allen, Basis Technologies’ VP of Integrated Client Solutions. Read on for her top insights for CPG advertisers to consider as they invest in and implement privacy-friendly advertising solutions.
Vanessa Allen: As signal loss increases, CPG marketers must focus on identifying who their target audience is and determining how they’re going to reach them in ways that respect consumer privacy. First-party data is critical for this, as it allows advertisers to tap into audiences who are already interested in their products. As such, it’s important for CPG advertisers and brands to ensure they’re collecting that data in a privacy-compliant manner and storing it in a way that makes it easy to use.
It's also important for CPG brands and advertisers to focus on researching and understanding consumer behaviors. Once they have those insights, they can adapt their campaigns to meet audiences’ distinct needs. That might look like leaning into opportunities with user-generated content on social to connect with younger audiences, or it could involve highlighting product and service offerings focused on convenience, since more and more shoppers (millennials, in particular) say this is a key factor that influences their purchasing decisions.
VA: As mentioned earlier, first-party data is crucial in a number of different ways. Many CPG brands—especially larger brands—have a ton of this data already and are well-positioned to use it to connect with audiences in personalized ways. They can use this data not only to focus on retaining audiences who they know have bought their products in the past, but also to push out new products to those audiences to drive trial.
Contextual targeting is another key tool to leverage, especially for more niche CPG brands. For instance, let’s say you’re a brand that offers direct delivery of toilet paper or paper towels, and you do it in a way that minimizes waste. So, you’re cutting down on how much plastic and extra packaging you use, and you’re offering a way for customers to get your products in a convenient way. Since many of your customers might be interested in sustainability or eco-friendly options, you might target display ads to websites that talk about green products and/or being a more environmentally conscientious consumer.
Another option is tapping into retail media networks (RMNs) to take advantage of their proprietary data. But it’s important to take a balanced approach to RMNs, as brands also need to be building up their own data so that they aren’t entirely reliant on these walled gardens. When it comes to leveraging RMNs or using other platforms’ second-party data, it’s important to incorporate them as part of a holistic media mix.
In terms of attribution, traditional CPG brands are already accustomed to using third-party brand lift studies to measure the results of their ads (i.e., household lift, awareness, sales lift), since they can’t measure footfall traffic. As we shift towards a privacy-first approach, these studies are going to continue to play a major role. For direct-to-consumer brands, it’s going to be pretty seamless for them to connect the dots on their website using first-party data they’ve collected.
VA: Absolutely! Let’s imagine you’re working on a campaign for an organic pet food. This product is pretty niche, so it’s going to be critical for you to understand your target audience and home in on where they’re spending time and consuming content. Most likely, your target customers are going to be doing research on the best pet foods, and using contextual targeting to place ads based on relevant keywords is one effective way to reach them. Additionally, you might determine that people who have pets who are sick are more likely to turn to different, specialty pet diets. To connect with those audiences, you might also target pages that discuss specific pet conditions that necessitate a different diet.
As another example, let’s go back to our earlier eco-friendly paper goods brand. In addition to leveraging contextual targeting, advertisers for this brand could use promotions (for instance, free shipping) to incentivize consumers to share their first-party data. Then, they could use that data to follow up with targeted, more personalized ads and recommendations based on this opted-in user data.
Though cookie loss will continue to change the game for digital advertisers, CPG marketers are well-positioned to reach audiences in privacy-friendly ways. By researching their consumers and adapting to meet their needs, leveraging first-party data, and using contextual targeting intentionally, CPG advertisers can connect with audiences at key moments of impact, drive conversions, and bolster brand loyalty.
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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.