Here’s a frightening tidbit: 35% of U.S. consumers told The Harris Poll that they would be happy if they never made an in-store retail purchase again. Seventy percent said they prefer zero human contact during shopping experiences. Presumably preferences will evolve after the pandemic ends but you do have to wonder how deep these scars will be.
The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has released a framework and technical paper detailing its proposed approach to ad measurement without third party cookies. The Federation represents ad industry associations around the world. They propose two complementary approaches, one using anonymized data and sampling across all channels and another tracking individuals when first party data can be had. No silver bullets here.
Speaking of politicians, let’s catch up with Big Tech Goes to Washington. In the politically-tinged TikTok soap opera, several players are having second thoughts about the ill-defined Oracle deal. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is eyeing anti-trust action against Facebook and the Justice Department and Republican state attorney generals are rattling anti-trust swords at Google. Outside the Beltway, Google faces a $3 billion lawsuit in the United Kingdom over children’s privacy at YouTube.
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.