It’s the end of advertising as we know it!
*At least, that’s what digital ad dorks and tech nerds will have you believe. Apple’s iOS14 update set off a cascade of moves throughout the industry a few months back; the iPhone makers announced they would begin to prohibit certain data collection and sharing unless users explicitly opted-in. And since 45 percent of mobile devices in the U.S. operate on iOS, the implications were wide-reaching.
GDPR foretold this whole data privacy movement in 2018. The move set off a cascade of movement by Facebook and Google — the two biggest digital ad players in the world — to account for it.
Now, Google is phasing out third-party cookies entirely over the next two years. Facebook cut its attribution window from 28 days to 7. Safari and FireFox are already blocking third-party cookies. That’s just some of it. (Side note: First-party data was always more important, still is, and is largely unaffected).
A quick scrub of your social channels would have you thinking the world is collapsing in on itself. Exhibit A:
No, the digital ad world is not collapsing on itself. But this fruitless obsession with attribution and ‘measuring everything’ is maybe — hopefully — collapsing on itself.
Attribution is valuable, like a screwdriver in your tool box. But it’s a tool; it’s not the tool box.
Somehow, though, after digital advertisers got high on all of the widgets and proclamations of ‘he with the most data wins!’, advertisers forgot what advertising is about in the first place. Stories. Connections. Ideas. Solutions.
There isn’t a human being alive who bought a thing because a cubicle-bound ‘digital wizard’ showed them the most common purchase path involved four clicks on three sites over the course of two weeks.
The reasons are obvious.
Customers don’t give a shit about data. They want good products that A) Solve a problem, B) Make them feel good, or C) Both. And more importantly —
Customers do a lot of really important things that advertisers can’t track. They text their friends. They FaceTime each other. They order multiple items in different color schemes, try them at home, then send back the ones they don’t want. They see someone else wearing it or using it. They discover a YouTuber wearing it during a how-to tutorial. And advertisers can’t track any of those things.
The obsession with measuring and tracking everything is not only based on an incomplete picture, but it gives advertisers a false sense of control while emboldening them to make bad decisions.
Lead gen campaigns are cautionary examples of this, and the automotive world (and much of the B2B world) are guilty of it. C-suites that incentivize high lead volumes and low lead costs, at all costs, are ignoring the most critical question of all — who the hell is actually buying?
So much of what causes someone to click on an ad or fill out a lead form has nothing to do with the ad or lead form itself, and much more to do with real world experiences, content consumption, word of mouth or peer endorsement, etc.
The best advertisers have been, and will continue to be, those who understand what motivates their customers. Your data infatuation will never favor good, consistent content marketing, but over time, it’ll outperform just about everything else in your arsenal.
Look at the decor in your home. Look at what’s parked in your driveway. Look at your closet. How many of those purchases had anything to do with clicks, and how many had something to do with appeal, design or the ability to solve a problem?
Attribution is helpful. But good products with good stories are what great brands — and not fly-by-night pretenders — are built on. No amount of data is a substitute for it.
-David