Last week there was a great article in Digiday about the fact that measurement, not targeting could be more at risk with the deprecation of the almighty cookie. And it brings up very important issues about measurement, attribution, and behaviors. All of this had led to a need to have new cookie-less solutions to deal with the loss of third party data.
This was a topic of conversation over the weekend with Wanda Meloni, but that talk did not head in the direction I thought it would. What we wound up circling in on was not whether we needed to move to new ways of tracking measurement in this new world, but rather whether the actual meaning of measurement is undergoing a change as well.
It’s easy to just point to measurements, come up with a new martech stack that can chase those around a zero party world, and call it a day. But the issue right now is the perfect storm, where how we track our audience at the same time our audience is changing as well. So just finding a new way to track the old measurements is no longer enough.
It’s not that these discussions haven’t been happening, it’s just that they are happening in separate sides of our market. So we just going to tear down those walls, smash these two things together and see where it leads us. And the first step is the realization that brands and marketers are not longer surrounded by customers, they are surrounded by cohorts. And those cohorts are building communities around your brands as well.
This is not new to anyone, but we don’t really think the implications have truly hit. We are facing one wave head on with cookies, but hoping we don’t get drowned by the one after it, which is this emergence of cohort-driven engagement. We hear it in conversations about creators and influencers and communities that brands and marketers are trying to work into their media plans and creative efforts.
So what do we need in a new cookie-less world that is becoming about cohorts instead of individuals, and is being driven by communities instead of audiences? This is where we wound up with our conversation over the weekend. If we could wave a wand and have this be the first day of measurements, what would be the components that we would have to have to make it work.
First, We need to figure out a way not to measure the connections between brands and their audience, but rather the connections between the audience itself. How do we find a way to understand not how the brand is driving a community, but how the community itself is creating a self-sustaining machine.
Second, we have to figure out a way to measure the contributions that audience members like influencers and creators bring to that machine, and how their efforts bring more people in. By the way, doing this also means we will be able to understand finally that creators and influencers are not the same thing, nor should they be measured the same.
And finally, we need a way that we can measure the health, for lack of a better term, of these communities. What is making them work, where are the holes in engagement, how can you assemble, tear apart and reassemble these communities and be able to tell if they are working better or worse for the brand and it’s objectives.
This is actual the measurement conversation we need to be happening, and maybe the death of the cookie is the forcing function we need to finally admit that not only are we losing our primary tool of measurement, but that the measurement itself no longer works in this world. Is this going to be hard? Absolutely, but if we get it right, this magical world of metaverses, user generated content, influencers, content creators, and everything else may actually turn out to work.
