Most marketers (60%) think consumer concerns about tracking technology could hurt their brand reputation and the same fraction agree user tracking will soon be obsolete, according to this global IDC study for Ogury. Despite this, 41% remain moderately or not at all familiar with cookieless alternatives. Ignorance may be bliss: 61% are confident they’ll be able to reach audiences at scale in the future.
This CMO Council report for Sprinklr takes a gloomy position: the headline is 66/% of marketers lack confidence in their ability to meet revenue goals, although that includes 39% who are moderately confident. More cheerfully, 36% are increasing their martech budget for 2023 compared with 25% planning to cut it. Back on the dark side: just 23% say they have a very effective relationship with IT and just 19% strongly agree they can convince their CFO to not cut the marketing budget.
While awareness of cookieless alternatives is interesting, the more important question is how many marketers are actually using them. This report by 33Across, which provides cookieless programmatic infrastructure, trumpets news that cooklieless ad CPMs average 21% less than cookie-based CPMs. They are more coy about revenue share, giving industry-by-industry details but no total. My math, which could be wrong, puts the figure about 23% for Q1 2023, maybe up 2% from the quarter before.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.