Email, First-Party Data Seen As Critical As Cookies Disappear, Brands Say (mediapost.com)

With growing calls for consumer privacy on the web, Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc. plan or already have made major changes to customer tracking. Apple now requires user opt-in for apps to track users, and Google is getting rid of third-party cookies on its market-leading Chrome browser. While these changes hearten privacy advocates, they’re likely to disrupt online retailers’ longstanding marketing practices. Without accurate consumer tracking, merchants are worried that a portion of their ads will be less effective at driving sales. In response, merchants plan to shift their marketing dollars to other channels that are more predictable at driving revenue. Online cookies are small pieces of text websites placed on a site visitor’s browser to track preferences, such as language, to know what consumers are interested in, and facilitate other functions. More companies started using cookies in late 1995 after Microsoft Corp. integrated them into its Internet Explorer browser. There are many different types of cookies, but third-party cookies are controversial because advertisers, marketers and data-analytics firms place them on consumers’ devices to know where a consumer’s been on the web, leading to more targeted ads.

AI advancements have expanded the ability to get visual. Google claims people who use AI Overviews also use Search more, with better results. Products like Lens, which launched in 2017, help people search for what they see with their camera. Google’s rollout of AI-powered updates for search results and links was announced Thursday, along with AI Overviews ads on mobile in the U.S. and redesigned Shopping Ads to run along with Google Lens visual search results. The company said Lens also will now work with video and voice. Ads that serve within AI Overviews are search and shopping ads from existing campaigns.

Simplicity in marketing isn’t easy to achieve but making engagement easy can be fairly simple. That sentence is a brain twister, right? Let me untangle the words. ‘Simple’ and ‘Easy’ are two different things, and both are critically important when it comes to effective marketing. Simple means making something uncomplicated, like expressing a brand proposition in just a few words. Easy means achieving something without effort, like creating an intuitive check-out funnel. The two concepts of simplicity and ease have been foundational in successful marketing for a long time. But if you consider that consumer attention span is only about 8 seconds, (down 30% from 2000), it makes focusing on simplicity and ease imperative. read more at: https://www.jschmid.com/blog/breakthrough-creative-art-of-simplicity/