What’s the Impact of a Cookie-Less Future on MarTech Stacks?

May 23, 2022

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Customer Relationship Management | Customer-Centric | Data-driven

Marketers remain reliant on third-party cookies, but are becoming more aggressive in acquiring first-party data. With half of marketers investing in innovations to engage with customers directly, a new study [pdf] from the Loyalty Research Center finds that Fortune 500 marketers are making several shifts to their marketing technology stacks to combat identification hurdles.

How Are Marketers Using Cookies?

Fortune 500 marketers are currently using cookies for 3 main activities, per the report: to capture and track website activity (93%); to capture and track across channels with unique identifier (90%); and for retargeting (86%).

By contrast, far fewer utilize cookies to capture and track email activity (47%) and for cart abandonment (39%).

What Does Cookie Deprecation Mean for the MarTech Stack?

Asked which of a variety of changes they are making to their technology stack given the deprecation of cookies, the Fortune 500 marketers surveyed were most likely to say that they are introducing new use cases for artificial intelligence (AI), with three-quarters saying this is the case. This is interesting in light of recent survey data indicating that using first-party data efficiently is a necessity when using AI in digital marketing.

Beyond new use cases for AI, 2 in 3 Fortune 500 marketers are sunsetting their data management platform (DMP) in response to cookie deprecation, while 6 in 10 are implementing an account-based marketing (ABM) platform. About 6 in 10 are building identity resolution algorithms (59%), which will help given that cookies are being widely used for cross-channel tracking. Also, close to 6 in 10 are implementing a customer data platform, which has shown up in earlier research as being high on the priority list for marketers.

What’s in the Current Fortune 500 MarTech Stack?

Marketers will be making these changes amid an environment in which a majority report using 7 of 12 systems identified. The most widespread technology in use is the CRM system, by virtually all (98% of) respondents. At least two-thirds also report using data management platforms (78%, though this figure may decrease given the above shifts anticipated), advertising platforms (74%), customer data platforms (72%), account-based marketing platforms (69%) and AI (67%).

Further down the list, fewer than half are using marketing analytics/measurement tools (42%) and marketing automation/journey management (34%), with full use of automation tools constrained by lack of training and knowledge.

Encouragingly, 85% of respondents reported that their current marketing stack is either extremely (24%) or very (61%) integrated.

About the Data: The results are based on a survey conducted with Rep Data of more than 175 Fortune 500 marketing leaders across multiple verticals and distribution models (B2B/B2C/B2B2C).

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