As we near 2021 and the year the Privacy First Era truly starts marketers need to understand how prepared their vendors are for that future. Here are 5 questions Advertisers and Agencies alike should be asking their vendors.

1) How well are you doing today on Safari?

Third party cookies (3pc's) have been barely effective on Safari since 2018. Many Mad tech companies, particularly in display advertising have effectively turned off Safari targeting and measurement because its not effective. If you cannot operate on Safari then its doubtful you will be able to operate on Chrome once the curtain falls on the 3pc world. Those that are behind on this today need to demonstrate how they will catch up

2) Are you going for an integration policy or a build policy or both? Show me the details - roadmap.

Some companies have spent the last 18 months working hard on their on their future facing tracking and targeting products. Others have been working hard integrating with other leading vendors. Some have done both and others have done neither. How well prepared these companies are for the coming changes can really be highlighted with how well they answer this question. It should be transparent to you the buyer to what degree they are reliant on other third parties and how much they are building themselves. No solution is guaranteed to work as the space moves so quickly so a range of options and a nimble development team here is crucial. If they talk about the integrations with other companies then the spotlight for how well prepared they are depends on the fortunes of those vendors, not relying on one option is definitely preferable.

3) How well integrated are they with Google, Facebook and Amazon?

Its sad but true that the big three come with a fairly big guarantee of safety in 2021. Google is unlikely to make changes that stop its core products from working. All three vendors are protected by their logged in environments. For advertisers and agencies alike having tech stacks that integrate well with the core components of the big three insulates them from damage in 2021. Furthermore if you vendor is well integrated into these players then they are more likely to be able to make good use of cookie replacement technologies from these players (such as FLOC or the various big three owned clean rooms).

4) How will you help us operate with our strategic publishers outside the big 3?

For many advertisers there are highly strategic publishers outside the big 3. For it is outside the big 3 that most of the content is produced and syndicated. The highly growing world of Connected TV and broadcast media moving online, the national press and more all need buying options outside of Google, Amazon and Facebook. It is vital then to ask your MAD tech companies how they will help you buy and measure media in this space. It would help too to ask the publishers (or strategic consultants ;-) ) how they think you can best utilise their new and growing opportunities.

5) How will you deal with Cross Media Signals data?

To truly be ready for the future advertisers need to have control of the data that will work in almost any media platform. Understanding how location (not hyperlocal), context, Temporal (time of day, day of week) impact your advertising performance as well as meta data like weather, events, holidays and the economy and being able to forecast that can be utilised in every major online buying platform as well as in fast emerging media like connected TV and digital out of home. The most progressive advertisers and tech companies allow AI led data usage that feeds this world and seamlessly connects to buying platforms even when IDs are not available. Being very strong here truly protects advertisers in a post cookie world such that if all ID targeting stops they can still run effective data driven targeting and attribution.

Bringing it all together.

These are the 5 questions I ask of vendors and use to review the health of a advertisers setup as well as the potential impact of changes next year.

These questions also highlight the need for a stack of different components and technologies. Targeting and measurement may be handled by different components. How to operate with Google, Amazon, Facebook and the Connected TV world could be 4, 5 or more different pieces of technology. Provided that it is seamlessly integrated so that marketers can deliver great advertising experiences then this is a good thing, though it needs planning and expertise. This is a huge year for the systems integrator.