Eye on the Industry

Data onboarding has always played a part in brands’ marketing and advertising strategies. However, over the last year or so the level of importance placed on identifying ways to collect and activate first-party data, has massively increased.

Building a data-centric organization and investing in the tools and talent required to improve customer marketing and engagement must also be accompanied by a focus on scale and consistency.

Now more than ever, global brands are thinking about the “next billion users”. Google being one of the first. Back in 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai started the Next Billion Users (NBU) initiative to research the needs of these new user groups.

Google’s updated timeline for its Privacy Sandbox rollout, including its two-year delay of third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, didn’t come as a surprise to many industry observers, given the limited utility of Google’s FLoC and the slow momentum of the Privacy Sandbox in the World Wide Web Consortium. Ultimately, Google’s decision underscores the power publishers now have, as well as the immense value that advertising-funded content brings to the open web...