2022 will see a rapid acceleration in data-driven marketing practices ahead of third-party cookie deprecation: Report

• As marketers race towards finishing their data foundations, many are already looking to the next stage of maturity.
• The adoption of machine learning to drive insight and action at scale - surprisingly, even 50% of the marketer segment who struggled the most already claim to be deploying it.

New research published today by next-gen Customer Data Platform Zeotap reveals that over 99% of marketers will have achieved a ‘golden record’ or single customer view by the end of 2022. Other findings, such as increasing adoption of machine learning, indicated that next year will see a rapid acceleration in data-driven marketing practices ahead of third-party cookie deprecation.

The research was launched by Zeotap, in its new report titled “The Data Secrets of Successful Marketers”. The report asked 500 senior marketing leaders how far above (or below) they achieved on their 2021 targets: they were then sorted into five distinct success archetypes according to their success. The respondents were then asked questions designed to analyse the degrees to which they were ‘data-driven’, and these responses were indexed against their success.

The research shows that, for many marketers, the unification of multiple data sources into a single customer view or ‘golden record’ remains a challenge. However, of the 20% of marketers who currently lack such a record, research showed that 99% of them will have achieved it by the end of 2022. This acceleration comes in part as a result of Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies in 2023 - with the removal of this key pillar of addressability, marketers have been forced to quickly compensate with a strong first-party data strategy, of which a single customer view is the foundation.

“As we enter a post-COVID and post-cookie world, we should expect rapid acceleration of data-driven marketing practices, ” said Daniel Heer, Founder and CEO of Zeotap. “For now, most marketers are in the starting phase of creating the usable dataset—the proverbial ‘golden record’ of a single customer view. As most marketers complete this foundational phase next year, we can expect the second stage to begin, in the form of the race for skilled talent and pioneering machine learning”.

The report identified further data practices that exhibited a close correlation to marketing success:

• CDP adoption (while DMPs inch towards extinction): The research revealed that more successful marketers have already begun making the shift to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), with a 39 percentage point difference in CDP adoption between the least and most successful marketers. Meanwhile, DMP usage decreases as marketing success increases.
• Preparedness for the cookieless future: While the more successful marketers have reported adoption of a wide range of post-cookie solutions ahead of 2023, the least successful marketers are more likely ‘putting all their eggs in one basket’, with nearly two-thirds (67%) gravitating to cohort-based advertising.
• A higher adoption of machine learning: Machine learning to drive insight and action at scale is already showing high adoption: research showed that even 50% of the marketer segment who struggled the most already claimed to be deploying it. The more successful the marketer, the higher this adoption climbs.

Regardless of their level of success over the last year, most marketers feel their companies have already crossed the data privacy bridge, with 91% expressing confidence in their data privacy practices. However, this confidence may be misplaced - in some groups, over 30% of those expressing confidence lacked a single customer view (a vital ingredient to effectively orchestrating consent).