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A World Without One-to-One Targeting

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Was it just three days ago that Google Chrome told the world that come 2022, it would block third-party cookies by default? Already a tsunami of coverage and analyses has resulted, much of it wondering about the negative fallout for addressable advertising.

This week on AdExchanger Talks, Belinda Smith provides the bull case for a world without universal addressability.

“When we got, I would argue, as close as we are probably going to get to one-to-one, I didn’t see any company that had unleashed itself and 10x’d its valuation because of the one-to-one addressable market,” she says. “I started in programmatic 10 years ago, and I thought then and think now that it’s very exciting, but it’s not the only thing. There are people in this industry who don’t know anything else. And I think that’s super problematic because we are ignoring 90% of marketing, which is everything that’s not addressable.”

Smith argues that the real value of one-to-one has still not been proven out in any ROI calculations she has seen firsthand.

“We didn’t hear a lot about what went right for marketers with [programmatic],” she says. “We talk a lot about the value of one-to-one, and I think what’s missing in that equation are the technologies and the people needed to make that happen. So when we talk about optimizing around 5 million different campaign lines globally … is it worth it? Can someone do it effectively? How do you QA that? When we talk about, for every lat-long point of interest I can have different creative, yeah you could! But how much did it cost? How many people did you need to run that? And how long did it take you to do that? Put all of that into your ROI calculation and tell me was it worth it?”

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