2026 advertising trends: Five signals shaping this year

  Identified in The 2021 Digital Advertising Trends Report published by Postclick, marketers are striving to improve and enhance their segmentation and targeting strategies in their digital ad campaigns. Carlos Lopez, SVP of Brand Planning at Digitas Health predicted that in 2021, the challenge will be to overcome the death of third-party cookies and still deliver a personalized advertising experience. It’s fair to say that his prediction will still be impacting marketers past 2021 with the delay of cookie deprecation. These goals along with the constantly changing digital landscape paint a challenging picture for even the most advanced marketers. Marketers can be prepared for the next era of digital marketing by finding the right mix of partners that offer privacy-safe, cookie-free solutions. Smart marketers will employ these solutions and compare these results with data from cookies. The Tapad + Experian Take The Tapad Graph enables brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms to identify and target individuals and households across their digital touchpoints. With this data, they can personalize messages across devices, measure and optimize throughout the customer journey, and then report back on conversions at the individual and household levels. Tapad, now part of Experian, leverages a machine learning algorithm that determines these connections at scale by using probabilistic models with authenticated, privacy-safe, real-time data. There are a myriad of cookieless IDs emerging in the marketplace, and it’s not likely going to be a one size fits all situation. In order to be prepared for the next era of digital marketing, marketers should diversify ID partners and be proactive with testing while the cookie is still around to benchmark against. With Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, we’ve been able to develop connections between traditional digital identifiers (IP Addresses, MAIDs, CTV IDs) and the new wave of cookieless IDs (UID2.0, Panorama ID, ID5 ID) that will be utilized in the future. Here’s an example of what The Tapad Graph and Switchboard looks like at the Household level with various traditional digital identifiers and cookieless IDs.         Get in touch

Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to prove ROI and efficiency of marketing activities in relation to business performance. On top of that, there are new privacy regulations and uncertainty around what new technologies will have to be implemented in order to replace the granular level targeting and measurement the industry historically has used third-party cookies for. It’s clear marketers are going to need the right tech stack and partners to continue to prove their team’s efficacy. We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current state of customer data-driven marketing and surveyed over 300 global marketing decision makers at the brand and agency levels. We found that marketing is facing increased demands today, insights from the study include:Consumers expect brands to deliver engaging experiences across highly fragmented journeys. Seventy-two percent of decision-makers reported that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. Marketing runs on data, but the rules governing customer data usage are changing quickly. More than 70% of study participants stated that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies, fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. These demands paint a challenging picture. Just as marketers are poised (and tasked) with delivering greater value to their organizations and customers, the ground rules are changing and threatening their ability to deliver. Indeed, 62% of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have either a “Significant” (40%) or “Critical” (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Effective identity resolution can help brands prepare for data deprecation challenges Marketers face a daunting landscape, but they can leverage the data, technology, and processes that comprise identity resolution to address business objectives, combat ecosystem complexity, and future-proof customer engagement efforts. By utilizing identity resolution, marketers will be able to match and connect multiple identifiers across devices and touchpoints. This allows for a cohesive, omnichannel view that enables brands to continue to deliver personalized and contextually relevant messages throughout the customer journey and without the use of cookies. The identity graph is the underlying infrastructure that defines connections between the numerous, fluid, and disparate identifiers created during moments of consumer engagement, turning disparate signals into addressable and actionable steps. These connections enable brands to bolster their ability to gain deeper customer insights and power audience building, attribution, and connected measurement. Identity resolution encompasses a wide range of capabilities that support an equally diverse set of marketing use cases. These include the targeting, personalization, and measurement of both known and pseudonymous audiences in the offline and digital worlds, which enables marketers to improve customer data management, drive more effective personalization, and gain insights and efficiencies through measurement across touchpoints. By taking the time to vet the privacy procedures and data collection processes of identity solutions you can reduce your regulatory risk and maintain customer trust. In an open-ended survey response, a marketer shared, “We’ve found that users are willing to volunteer data when they understand what it’s being used for and are asked for clear consent.” Finding the right partners to help navigate the changes The scramble to find an alternative to third-party cookies has slowed down since Google announced they will be delaying their cookie removal until late 2023. However, this gives marketers a unique opportunity to take advantage of the additional time and feel more prepared and confident in their solutions. With the delay, marketers can now test ID solutions and compare apples to apples with data from the third-party cookie while it’s still active and addressable. Test and find a solution that works now, so there are no surprises once cookies have finally made their way out the door in 2023. At Tapad, a part of Experian, we’ve developed a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for the myriad of cookieless identifiers emerging in the market. As a new module in the Tapad Graph, Switchboard will connect traditional digital identifiers to cookieless IDs to support the entire ad ecosystem with privacy-safe future-proof identity resolution. Get in touch 

Email hashing was originally intended to be used as an email security feature that has ended up being a very powerful marketing tool. A hashed email is a cryptographic function that changes an email address to a random code which can be used as an anonymous customer identifier. This code is privacy-safe and cannot be traced back to the customer’s email address. However, this hashed email can function like a digital passport that traces every behavior and action a customer takes when logged into an account that is authenticated with an email, making hashed emails a goldmine for customer data. Today emails are used across traditional publishers and within the CTV ecosystem; tying them to more consumer touch points than ever before. Why the emphasis now? Cookies are on their way out the door and have been the primary way that many marketers have tracked their existing and potential customers. In order to replace this granular level of data, marketers are likely going to need multiple solutions. With so many cookieless solutions and IDs appearing in the marketplace, the mapping of the customer journey is bound to be fragmented. Relying on first-party data, such as hashed email, is just one way to reduce that fragmentation; as it can serve as an authenticated starting point for cross-device identity resolution that can be leveraged for targeting, personalization and measurement. How can Tapad + Experian help? Tapad + Experian’s Hashed Email Onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers through high precision probabilistic identity. By onboarding hashed emails and incorporating them within your Tapad Graph file you can: Build a more holistic view of individuals and households and their relationship to email addresses in your first-party data set Leverage these relationships for increased cross-device scale for targeting Employ personalization tactics at the household or individual level across devices Create new audience segments and look-alike models for cross-channel activation Design more inclusive measurement and attribution for customer journey mapping Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email onboarding product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view, combined with the attributes you need, in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch