With Google repeated postponements With the discontinuation of cookies, many companies face the prospect of making significant changes to the way they operate. And it is the CTO who is primarily responsible for supporting these changes, as new media strategies require innovative technical approaches.
While keeping an eye on their technology options as they continue to drive digital transformation projects – generative AI, big language models and automation, for starters – CTOs are tasked with guiding organizations through the brave new world of advertising must have one phrase at the top of their to-do list in 2024: be more combinable. But why is this new industry mantra so important?
Advertisers need to develop new media strategies
The changing nature of the advertising landscape, shaped by Google’s plans to close third-party cookies, growing consumer awareness of privacy issues and an ever-changing regulatory framework, means brands need to create new media strategies.
Although Google has postponed the end of the cookie several times, continuing to use third-party identifiers is no longer a realistic or sustainable option. They will – eventually – be turned off, and they have never been perfect in terms of accuracy and performance anyway. Consumers are increasingly rejecting tracking cookiesalso, therefore, continuing to use them would damage the brand’s reputation.
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The question businesses face now is: how will they reach their target audience in the future? Other ID-based solutions have their limitations; There are multiple identification options that will inevitably result in a fragmented landscape and are complicated for media owners to operate and support.
Targeting methods like geolocation and contextual struggle to provide the accuracy and performance advertisers need, while Google’s Privacy Sandbox is limited to the Chrome browser.
However, through the judicious use of first-party data, advertising strategies built around these alternatives can provide a better way forward for brands. Therefore, many companies will want to test several of these options to find the methods that work best for them.
Complex technology requires a framework
While it’s not up to the CTO to make decisions about marketing strategy, they will need to make it easier to experiment with cookieless alternatives, which will require back-end flexibility. While the technology stack in any digital business is rarely static for any period of time, implementing additional solutions and supporting new platforms is not straightforward. This is why it makes sense to adopt the principles of composable architecture.
In a nutshell, composable architecture is a principle that involves dividing a company’s technical assets into small, simple components that can be easily connected together, combined and reused to build systems that support all types of business processes.
Built in the cloud, components such as customer databases, ad servers and the like can be connected via APIs with minimal technical skills required, and replacing or changing individual components is a quick and easy process. Compared to legacy infrastructure built on monolithic architecture, it provides a much better foundation for experimentation with new marketing tools.
Composable architecture offers companies a way to be flexible and adaptable when it comes to direct collaborations with partners in the advertising ecosystem, be they publishers, retail media networks, identity providers, measurement providers, SSPs or DSPs.
APIs, microservices, and containers provide the building blocks that enable companies to quickly create, test, and deploy composable solutions that enable these collaborations. These building blocks can then be reused and reassembled multiple times for each new collaboration.
Where composable architecture becomes more technically challenging is ensuring that all connected components can communicate effectively with each other. Fortunately, as more software solutions for each element of a composable system become available, CTOs can choose those that best suit the organization’s purposes and easy-to-develop APIs.
The challenge of protecting your own data
Marketing practices based on first-party data depend on consumer consent and trust. While it’s up to marketers and legal advisors to handle consent collection, opt-out notices, and making the value exchange clear to the customer, it’s the CTO’s job to ensure this sensitive data is protected at all costs.
This is another area where composable architecture brings clear advantages. Facilitating direct collaborations with partners — whether brands, publishers or retail media networks — while ensuring the company maintains full control of its data requires the use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).
For example, to enable more precise segmentation, Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) is a PET that allows multiple parties to analyze and extract insights from each other’s data sets while maintaining the confidentiality of their own data.
Another PET, Differential Privacy, allows organizations to share insights with others without exposing any personally identifiable information (PII); while Synthetic Data allows the generation of a version of a dataset that statistically resembles the real data, but does not contain any identifiable individual or real-world data.
With composable architecture, these PETs can be quickly and easily connected when needed and reused for each subsequent collaboration when needed.
Conclusion: Composable architecture is the foundation for future advertising processes
The disappearance of third-party cookies is a golden opportunity for brands to design and implement new media strategies that respect consumer privacy and improve their advertising performance. CTOs need to think about how they can best support these methodologies to enable the marketing team to achieve their KPIs and, in turn, help the entire organization achieve its business objectives.
Following the principles of composable architecture is key for companies looking for an agile, flexible and scalable platform to support their advertising collaborations. Composable solutions can help organizations build sustainable, future-proof advertising processes that can be tailored to each use case.
They also allow companies to connect multiple layers of protection to consumer data, ensuring that the bond of trust with customers remains intact.
Alastair Bastian is CTO at leading UK-based data collaboration technology provider, InfoSum
