Data Deprecation and Marketing Disruption B2C & B2B

So, I found this Podcast very insightful and relevant to an experience I recently had in mid-2024 where I was tasked with having to audit a company's roster of 3rd parties and understand what the impact would be for Google's Cookie Deprecation! Something interesting that I took away was the view of how it impacts B2B. My experience thus far has only viewed things through the B2C lens.

Podcast superstars:

• Srividya Sridharan, Podcast host and VP, Group Director

• Stephanie Liu, Senior Analyst for B2C marketing

• Brett Kahnke, Principal Analyst for B2B marketing

Recap:

Started with Apple, Safari Browser, blocked 3rd party cookies be default. Rise of regulation, GDPR, globally, as well as state-by-state in USA, consumers are fed up with these, installing ad blockers, disabling location sharing, data breaches and negative experiece, B2C realm uprise of walled gardens with 1st party data, Facebook and large platforms are too strict/controlling.

Marketing mindset is shifting to permission based marketing. B2B is just as bad a hit. Most advertisers aren't ready today. Marketers have been planning, learning, flipping, trying to navigate this topic. Google's several walk-backs have hurt the momentum for change.

Forrester survey in Dec, said a 5th of marketers are testing alternative targeting methods.

UK anti-trust regulator is skeptical of Google's Privacy Sandbox and wants to make sure that their isn't a monopoly.

Impetus behind this is the fact that cookies are already dead across all other major browsers [firefox, safari, brave. see browser market share in appendix]. Beyond this, Chrome users can still download and add adblocker extensions.

Spectrum of change for marketers - B2B vs B2C has less impulse buying, more time baked into the funnel process. Some clients have over reacted by treating the entire web as though it were GDPR.

Pain points - loss of visibility (60% or more on the site) due to data deprecation which creates measurement problems, optimization problems, personalization problems. However, the deeper down the funnel, the loss of visibility is less and revenue is not that impacted due to engagement opportunities to collect PI data.

In B2B, the next hurdle on the horizon is IP address blocking. Google made the decision to block IP addresses in incognito mode.

Easy to think of B2B and B2C as separate worlds but there is overlap when it comes to the impact of cookie deprecation.

IP address masking was launched by a consumer class action lawsuit against Google over the splash page that loaded in incognito was misleading because it advised consumers they could browse privately but in fact not since their IP addresses were being shared through Google Analytics and companies could still drop their cookies (shocker!).

IP address risk/threat in B2B is regarding a fast growing data area of "intent data" to understand which parties are in a "buying cycle" using Forrester's wave data method (never heard of this before but here's a summary of it. You can buy the latest report here for ~$2995... When they went through the last wave process, Forrester asked clients what their preparation was for deprecation... the clients tested and found that cookies were simply a connector, a short cut, and that you could resolve/work around each interaction for a collective loss of signal around only ~20%. For B2C, the workarounds are by using mobile ids, device ids, hashed emails, etc....

However, for B2B, IP addresses are the primary way of knowing that the traffic is linked to a business. And while you can still use the aforementioned methods used in B2C for B2B, at some point, you need to know which company those ids are connected to. And right now, the B2B world doesn't really have an answer for this challenge of eventual drop of IP Addresses.

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Risks on the B2C side:

• Regulatory fines (kinda a toothless tiger compared to large cap revenues).

• Office dynamics between Marketing and Compliance teams

• Consumer trust (California suit against DoorDash)

  
  

Risks on the B2B side:

• Compliance teams working with sales and marketing teams

What should companies do to strengthen their collection practices:

• B2C - be very strategic in what data you are collecting/need. It's not a free for all... permission based, asking for explicit permission. Consumers must be convinced to share data. Luxury/Beauty industry is very good at this because they need data points that can't be inferred or implied (like skin tone, weight, size, background), so they use conversational and gamifying methods to get this information.

  • Try and test alternative targeting methods like contextual targeting (first party data, cohort based advertising, unified id solutions, server-side tracking, machine learning and predictive analytics, consent management platforms (CMPs), zero party data, local storage and device identifiers)

• B2B - Take a hard look at marketing, account for what is at risk in your current state... B2B need to focus on first party data... make sure legal and compliance are on board... don't settle on "less is more" when it comes to your data and fearing explicit requests to not advertise.

Prediction Season - what will happen to data deprecation in the coming year?

• B2B - Blocking of IP addresses is not going to happen... why damage business in a way that out weighs the benefits? Things are going to stabilize in the USA... with 20 states having laws in place so the rapid "I can't keep up" will end.

• B2C - Laws are stabilizing and plateauing ... it's possible a Federal Privacy law will be passed. So, what will this look like? Google will kill privacy sandbox due to sharp questions abroad. Google's dominance is hard to brush aside.

  
  

• will need to be rethought, if nothing else.

Appendix