The Funeral Preparations for the Death of the Cookie Must Start Now, with Jeff Greenfield, CEO at Provalytics

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

Peter Crosby (00:16):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Well, folks, this is it. 2024 is actually the year the cookie finally dies. No more reprieves, and that means that you need to get really serious about the steps you need to take to build out the new data that tells you what's working, what's not, what to test, and where to invest. Hey, that rhymes. Anyway. Jeff Greenfield, CEO of Protic has done these deep dives with hundreds of clients and came to Lauren Livak Gilbert, and me fully armed with advice and best practices about how to prepare for the cookies funeral. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We're just delighted to have you here.

Jeff Greenfield (00:59):

It's a pleasure to be here, Peter. We're here to talk about some crazy stuff that's happening and the advertising and the ad tech ecosystem, so I'm excited to have this conversation.

Peter Crosby (01:12):

Well, I have to say we've done a few podcasts over the years on the freaking cookie crumbling and going away, but it's starting to feel like this might be the year Google's saying it's time. It's for real. I don't know. We'll see. I feel like we've been talking about it, and I would think by now every single brand and software and agency should be prepared for this to happen, but I'm guessing that's not really the case. Without the cookie attribution, it's going to become even more complicated than it already is, and it'll be harder for brands to see the full picture and know what's really working it seems like. So first of all, is 2024 the year, and what are you hearing from the brands that you work with?

Jeff Greenfield (02:00):

2024 is definitely the year Google has put this off as long as they possibly can, because remember, this is all happening under the guise of privacy. And this all started a number of years ago with GDPR in the uk. Now in the US we have privacy regulation going on, and every state has their own version of new regulations that you have to adhere to. So this is just kind of part of the full train that's gone on. But brands and the folks at the ad tech ecosystem have been ignoring this for a very long time, and there was a report out this week that talks about the IAB tech lab. They've gone in and done some testing on it and have come up with a list of stuff that's not going to work anymore the way that people are expecting it. And just like any change with advertising technology, everyone just says, oh, it's not going to happen.

(02:58):

Things will be the same. And then there's this, oh my god moment, what's happened? And that's what's going to happen. And unfortunately for a lot of brands, this hits right in Q4, which is right in the major shopping season for most of retail and stuff like that. And the problem for most brands is that if you're a small startup, you have less than 50 people. The changes that you need to make for this aren't going to be that difficult. But the problem is the larger the brand, the more processes, the more people have to touch things and reality, it's going to take a year to a year and a half for you to really make the changes that are necessary. And I just don't see it happening. There's just a lot of, yeah, we're going to be fine. It's not going to be a big deal.

(03:46):

And for some brands, they will be okay. But you said something interesting earlier, Peter, because you talked about not seeing the full picture. The reality is for most brands, I would probably say 95 to 99% of them, they have not been seeing the full picture for a very long time. So what I'm excited about is that this whole cookie frenzy that's going on is freaking out a lot of people, which may force them to say, Hey, maybe we need a different perspective. So maybe this is just enough of an oomph to push people forward to realize, Hey, we've been missing out on a lot. We should probably get a new perspective on things.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:27):

And what are some of the things that you mentioned that aren't going to work the same, just to give brands a perspective on the, oh, no, I might need to change these things. What are your top three?

Jeff Greenfield (04:37):

So number one, where everyone's going to notice it in terms of advertising is behavioral retargeting. Behavioral retargeting. Somebody comes to your site like you go to nordstrom.com and you're checking out a pair of shoes, let's say, and then you go into your Facebook feed 20 minutes later and then, oh my God, there's a picture of that same shoe you were looking at, and you can scroll through the ad to see all the different colors and same types of shoes that's going to stop working. So behavioral retargeting is they're making waves and making effort towards it, but there's going to be a hiccup with that. That's a really important thing. Number one, that's on the targeting side. The other aspect is a little bit deeper on the targeting side, the ability to target. Now, for those who are deep into Facebook and have been into the paid social world for the last two years, you've noticed that all of a sudden, and you've probably seen notices at the top when you log into the ad marketplace, you notice there's this headline that says some of your campaigns have been affected and are not able to work as well as they were before because those targets are no longer there.

(05:47):

So then you go to rebuild campaigns and you're like, oh, what happened to the Ford F-150 drivers? Oh, okay, that's not available anymore. So what's happening now is that your targeting is going to have to be broader. So that's going to be a freakout moment for a lot of what we call data-driven digital marketers who believe that the more targeted you get, the better the ads work. But what they forget is the more targeted you are, the more expensive it is to deliver the media. And I find that a lot of marketers are not associating their buys with actual profit at the end of the day, because once you start to look at things, yes, you can target really, really finally, and you can get customers, but when you actually run the numbers at the end of the day on what it costs you to get those customers, it turns out that sometimes you're actually losing money for the company.

(06:42):

So broad targeting should be less expensive and actually will hit more people and has been proven to actually work really well. I mean, before there was digital, that's all there was broad targeting, and somehow brands like BMW and PepsiCo and Coke, they somehow were able to build huge big brands and work out really well. So that's going to be the second thing that's not going to work well. So we've got behavioral retargeting, we've got just targeting in general, and then also measurement. Now, when I talk about measurement, your GA four is still going to work because GA four was only click-based attribution. But those who were doing any type of pixel based attribution where you have a tag on your site and you had tags in your ads and they were building out the full customer journey where they were stringing together both clicks and impressions, that's going to stop working as well because that requires third party cookies. Now the reality is is that that multitouch attribution stopped working for Safari and iOS users a very long time ago, but no one really noticed because no one was really talking about it because there's still data there. So it must be working. But when this all kind of happens, that's going to be kind of the death, if you will, into multi-touch attribution as we've known it. That's required tags. So those are your three big things that are going to stop working

Peter Crosby (08:09):

And all of that kind of put together just I would imagine makes it difficult to make the budget decisions, the investment decisions that you need to make over any long time horizon because there's just so much uncertainty. I would think

Jeff Greenfield (08:26):

There is. But going back to what you said earlier about having the big picture, the reality is is that most marketers today are making these decisions based upon completely inaccurate information. When you actually sit down and you look at the data and you see, okay, we had X number of sales, and then you go back and you track through, let's say you're using GA four to see whatever GA four says, you're going to see that about 20% of your sales you can track back to some sort of click action, and then there's that big 80% bucket. For some marketers, it's 90% bucket that says, this sale came from organic or it came from brand search. So that's a problem though because I can't spend more on organic. Those are people who just show up and I can't throw a million dollars at brand search because that's a reaction to awareness out in the marketplace.

(09:24):

So most marketers for a long time have been making decisions based upon only 20% of the data. And so what's interesting is that if we were to go back five to eight years ago, the big discussion was about fraud. Ad fraud is always the big thing, and we want to get rid of ad fraud. And Prichard at p and g made a big thing about how they cut down all their ad spending and limit it to only a couple of hundred sites, and they didn't see much of a change in their ads. In fact, they actually improved sales as a result of that. But when I talked to some of the larger brands that are out there and I asked them about fraud, fraud is now considered shrinkage and retail. It's the cost of doing business. It's like the percentage that you have to pay to strike for your credit card fee as long as it stays under a certain percentage, it's okay.

(10:16):

The big problem that I'm hearing that's going on out there is that how do I scale my marketing? I can get 10 more million this month to spend if I knew where to put it at. And I'm hearing great things about CTV, I'm hearing great things about podcast advertising, but there's no clicks for those things. So how do I know, how do I integrate that into that, into the whole thing and how do I see what's going on? So that's a big question is how do you unlock what I'm calling navigational traffic to your site? Because most marketers don't know how people found them, and they would like to have a degree of certainty so they would know if they spent there, it would actually end up driving some value for them. That's the biggest piece for marketers right now is I need to scale. I need to know that I'm getting less signal than I ever had before, and I'm concerned about how do I spend my money and do it in a way that I can be a good fiduciary for my brand.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:16):

For the brands that are preparing for this or have been preparing for this for years now, what are they doing? What are some of the methodologies they're focused on? What are they developing to be able to, when this turns off, go, okay, we're fine. We're ready, we got it.

Jeff Greenfield (11:31):

Well, the first thing that they're doing is it's kind of they're going back to the future. They're looking at advertising and marketing through a different lens. If you were to talk to most digital marketers today, the way they look at advertising is you make an investment, it drives clicks, which then drives sales. It's like a three-step process because when you go in Google Analytics or any Adobe Analytics, that's all you see is clicks. So clicks are what lead to sales, and there's cost per click, a click-through rate, all of this terminology. But way before that, you made investment and with that investment you purchased impressions and those impressions in the marketplace build awareness. That awareness drives people to come and visit your store, whether it's in the mall retail or it's online. And online is clicks. And then that leads to sales. So the smart marketers are going back to how things were done in the earlier days, and they're actually looking at the impressions that are in market, not the clicks that are in market and not the spend that's in market spend is what you buy, but remember the cost for a specific impression can go up or down because it's a bidding type process for most programmatic and for Facebook and things like that.

(12:50):

So you want to keep track of how many impressions are in market every single day in this world now where you can't look at users on an individualized basis. That's what this whole privacy stuff is all about. The getting rid of cookies is that the ability to see a user path to purchase is gone. You can see them when they come to your website, you can see what they do on your website, but how they got there, you're never going to see anymore. So now instead of looking at things on a user basis, you need to look at things in aggregate and look at impressions on a daily basis. Once the brands that are starting to look at that, they're starting to get insight to seeing, Hey, we did something about 45 days ago where we had a really big influx with impressions in Dayton, Ohio where we did a CTV test and all of a sudden we saw traffic start to increase a couple of days later in Dayton, Ohio, and all of a sudden we have all these new leads in Dayton, Ohio, and that's leading to new business six months later.

(13:47):

So maybe there's something to this, but if they weren't looking at impressions, they would've just been looking at clicks and they would've had no idea where those clicks came from, and it would've just gone in the organic bucket and no one would've been able to track it back. So that's the biggest thing is you're having to kind of reevaluate and redo the way that you're looking things and add additional columns to your Google sheet or whatever you're using to track your media to start tracking impressions. In fact, most brands today, most marketers today, they've got a Google sheet where they're tracking all of their media and they've got it in there by day, how much they spent, how many leads, how many sales came in, what the total cost is per each one, so on and so forth, and how many clicks, but there's no column for impression. So the number one thing I would tell folks to do, add a column for impression. And yes, your Google sheet probably goes back the last three years. I would go back over the last three years and start filling it in because now you can start to do some historical reporting to start looking at trends to see when you put impressions in market, this is actually what you end up with. So

Peter Crosby (14:51):

Jeff, do you have, it's always nice to bring these things to life for our listeners so that they can apply it to how they work in their organization. Do you have some case studies that you can run us through that give a sense of how it's meeting up with their processes and their people and their tech to make all this happen?

Jeff Greenfield (15:14):

Sure, absolutely. Thanks. One of the most important things when we're talking about impressions and stuff is we also have to realign looking at the channels and how we look at the channels differently. One of the first things that I'll talk about as we get into these case studies is reevaluating how we're looking at brand search, because we talked about that earlier in terms of brand search being kind of this navigational type thing. Most people look at brand searches. It's a place to spend money. We tend to educate our clients and look at brand searches, though it's actually a conversion event, it's a leading indicator if you will, that your advertising is actually working and you can actually, the nice thing about Google Ads is you can actually go back historically, look at your Google ads and look at what is your impression share for your Google brand search term.

(16:05):

You can look at your clicks, you can look at the impressions. And what you should see is as you're doing more advertising and you're increasing impressions, as you're building awareness, you should start to see more and more people search for you. And that's what some of our clients have seen. So I've got a couple of case studies right here for you that I think would be good for folks. The first is a $2 billion retailer. Now, this retailer, they're spending a significant amount of money on search, and the reason that people spend so much money on search is because it's so attributable. You spend money, you get the clicks and it shows up in Google Analytics. So it's like you would be silly not to be spending your dollars there, but search was getting about 85% of the credit because most of the spend was down on the bottom part of the funnel.

(16:54):

So as a result, they weren't spending any money and the upper part of the funnel in terms of what GA four was showing, because GA four doesn't allow you to look at things like CTV and podcasts now had, they had done some geo holdouts and experiments with CTV and podcasts, but they didn't actually show up anywhere. So it was very tough. They could show that with the experiments they were getting some incremental lift, but since it wasn't showing up and what the organization considered to be their single source of truth, it wasn't anything that could actually gain any budget. So we came in and did a historical analysis on all their data where we went back over the course of the year that included those experiments for both CTV and podcast, looked at everything in a holistic manner. So we're not just looking at things in isolation, we're looking at everything.

(17:45):

And what we're able to find is that the CTV and podcasts were actually killing it. They were actually performing incredibly well because they were filling the funnel. It's really simple. They call it a funnel for a reason. I know that it's been proven there's a cycle now, but I still like the funnel analogy because the funnel shows that up here, if you spend here, you fill it up, but if you don't spend up there, you still have a funnel, but it's smaller, which means this concept of reach is significantly less. So you're advertising to fewer, fewer people. Your advertising has to work hard. And that's what was happening and that's why search was getting all of the credit. So they shifted budget over, they didn't actually increase their budget, they took budget away from search the stuff that was not performing as well as they thought, and they moved it over to those more upper funnel channels and they ended up with an incremental $15 million in incremental revenue in the following quarter by following that, which is pretty significant now. And in that case, you could say, were they wasting the budget on search? It was looking like it was performing, but those dollars could be better spent on the top of the funnel. The problem is, is that when you put those dollars up there, there's no direct feed from there going into GA four because those dollars are leading to impressions, not clicks, because there's nothing to click on in a CTV ad. And that's one of the big issues. So that was a larger retailer. Go ahead, Lauren. I'm sure you have a question. I

Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:17):

Was just going to say, I feel like sometimes if there aren't clicks than brands and retailers, to your point that you've been talking about, just say, oh, it's not worth it because we can't show the connection. But if you were in a boardroom and someone said that to you, how would you answer that from maybe let's go from a brand perspective because they need to show those numbers to their leadership team to be able to unlock the budget. I understand what you're talking about, but for them, they need to make that case. So how would they do that?

Jeff Greenfield (19:47):

Yeah, great question. It was always the belief in digital marketing that there's performance and then there's brand. Brand lifts the performance, but you can never directly tie brand to revenue. And there was always the belief that you never even want to attempt to do that because if you do and you fail, you're going to lose those brand dollars. Well, the reality is those brand dollars have been shifting over to performance for years anyway. Even the large brands, most of them are about half the dollars are on performance, half are on brand anyway. But before digital, all there were brand dollars, there was brand dollars and there was couponing, and the brand dollars are what drove the revenue. And they typically drove revenue always within a quarter. And now we're seeing that those brand dollars do drive that revenue. You have to be a little bit more patient with them because there's this concept called days to conversion.

(20:46):

And what that means is, is that if someone is exposed to an ad for your brand for the first time, how long does it take them to actually convert? And so when you think about things like page search where someone's typing in a generic search term for a brand, like a category search, I'm already on market. I'm already thinking about buying that timeframe is going to be shorter. But upper funnel channels like CTV, even native advertising or digital out of home, that kind of paints a picture in the back of my head that is building awareness and that's going to take a little bit longer, but we have not seen a majority of sales that have lasted any longer than 90 days, especially with the way that most people are thinking and most of the buying cycles are. So the key is in the boardroom is demonstrating and showing pictures that actually show, Hey, this advertising, this brand advertising is lifting this and is having an impact over time.

(21:48):

And you can actually see it. And then for the folks, the analytical folks showing them the math behind it, and then of course you can show the math behind it and you can say that this is 91% accurate, but we always say that's just a bunch of numbers and it's a model and models are useful, but models are wrong because we cannot get inside of people's heads. We're solving very complicated stuff with machine learning and ai, but it is not an exact science. So what we say is, Hey, let's do an experiment. Let's test it out. Let's see if the model is correct. And let's say we're talking about doing some branding with CTV. So what we would do is that we would go in and suggest to do a small test. We would pick out several cities where we would go in and we would go and do some CTV buys in that area, and then we would look for leading indicators like, do we see brand search go up?

(22:41):

Do we see search traffic go up there? Then we would see over time that eventually sales or leads or whatever would follow very quickly thereafter. That type of pinpoint execution that demonstrates to the board saying, okay, this stuff really works. Let's blow this out across on a national basis. But sometimes you have to go, you need to go through those steps. You need to be able, number one, to access the way people are thinking about things and demonstrate to them, number one, that the lens that you're looking through is you're only seeing about 20% of the data. You're making decisions only based around 20%. Here's a broader picture. Now let's do some experiments to prove that this actually works. And when they see the results of those, then they're like, okay, let's open up the purse strings and let's spend some more dollars.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:32):

The test and learn approach, we always talk about that on the podcast. Sorry, Peter, go ahead.

Peter Crosby (23:38):

I totally agree. It can be frustrating, particularly when your processes and your data that you've relied on, even as it starts to deprecate is sort of crumbling around you. But the only way to sort of get back onto this new path is to build a new set of processes to prove it out, to unlock the budget. I think you have another case study for us.

Jeff Greenfield (24:04):

Yeah, this one's for $150 million retailer, like a standard retailer, 90% of their sales are during those three and a half months of the holiday shopping center season. All of their budget was lower funnel. They bring on board a new CMO, and that's one of the greatest things about being a new marketing professional at an organization is that they're bringing you in to make changes. They're bringing in because you've got great ideas and the smart ones will come in, spend a month or two to evaluate what's going on and then come in and make some changes. This CMO came in and said, influencers are really important. Let's do some tests with TikTok in particular and Pinterest. Those two areas specific to this retailer, what happened was the experiments look like they work, but still the whole focus of the organization was all on last click. And that's the problem is that when you've got executives and board members that are aware of Google Analytics and aware of this concept of clicks, I'm sorry, they just can't get their eyes off of it.

(25:20):

So you need to have this approach where you go in and you do a full funnel look at things, which is what we did. We did a historical analysis showing that the impact from the TikTok and from the Pinterest that they did, and then we went and redid a couple of the experiments by redoing those experiments. We got them focused now on what the experiments would show, and essentially the experiments validated what the model was showing, and then that unlocked an additional million dollars of budget that they were able to put there, and that led to an incremental six and a half million dollars in sales. So the key here is that you have to follow the process. You can't come right in if everyone is focused on clicks and ga, you can't come in and say, Hey, I've got new information. Here's an experiment that shows there give me more money. They're not going to do it because they're still looking at the same set of numbers. You need to come in and look and show them a different view. You need to access that information and show them how what they're seeing is only a tiny bit of things. They're missing the impressions. You need to show them an overall result. Then you come in with some pinpoint experiments that validate it, and that's when you go in and you ask for more money.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:38):

I think this is the perfect time now for brands to start socializing this, right? Because if it's to really the cookie's actually going away in Q4, it takes a lot of change management in an organization to say, here's the metrics we've been looking at. They are going away. Here's what we're looking at now. Here's how we tie them together and here's how we're going to make decisions. I hear this as a really big call out to say, start now. Get your executives on board. Help everyone to understand because if not, it's going to be really hard when all of a sudden this is gone and nobody understands why and your numbers are going to change. So the change management and the education I feel like needs to be super strong starting now to get to this Q4 kind of big moment,

Jeff Greenfield (27:24):

No, you're a thousand percent right on Lauren. This is, there's so much being written about this. Every single person who touches digital marketing, even board members are aware of cookies, and this is being brought up now in the boardroom. What are we doing about the cookie problem? Those are the questions that are being asked. And even though what we're talking about in terms of changing the view from clicks to impressions to then do experiments to get more money, doesn't necessarily, it's not a direct answer to that question. You need to use this as an excuse to then go in and change your view of things because that's going to improve your ROI. That's going to increase sales. That's going to have a big impact. So you need to take, what I'm saying is you need to take advantage of this opportunity because it's not going to be here for that long. Also, you need to do something because if you're not being asked today about what you're doing about this, you're going to be asked tomorrow and you need to come up with the plan. And if you don't have a plan, unfortunately they're going to bring someone else in who's going to have a plan, and that's not going to be good.

Peter Crosby (28:41):

And Jeff, it feels to me and tell me, I've been hearing consistently throughout that one of the ways to really get started here is to do a historical deep dive on the broader set of data so that you're looking at the past as if the past was happening according to these new rules and seeing what you already can glean from that, and then that leads you towards the test you should run. Did I understand your talk about historical deep dives correctly?

Jeff Greenfield (29:15):

Yeah. You're a thousand percent, right. And going back to what Lauren said about change management, it's this concept of what I've always called access, erase, replace. You need to go in and access the information that people are used to. Last click, last click. Let's actually dig in and see what last click is. However, we've been looking at things historically for the last year, what it actually tell us, how much of our sales are actually coming from navigational stuff that we don't know where they came from versus actual clicks. So that's the first thing. If it turns out that only 10% is coming from navigational stuff, then you don't have a problem. But that's maybe less than 1% of the folks out there. Most of your sales are coming from stuff that you have no idea where they came from. They just showed up. So that's the first thing is getting access to all that data.

(30:11):

Then what you want to do is take all of that data and do an analysis like what our company does and other companies do to where you're looking at things through a full funnel lens where you're actually seeing what is a better representation. What I would call everyone would agree that that representation that I just talked about, where most of it's coming from navigational, that that's incorrect. It's limited information, but it's wrong. So what I'm talking about doing is taking that wrong information, accessing it, sharing it with everyone, and then doing a deeper dive analysis to have something that is, let's say, less wrong. It's more, right? It's less wrong than that one, but it actually unlocks how people are finding you so that you have more picture into those upper funnel channels. Because anything upper funnel is not going to show up as a click.

(31:05):

It's going to come in where people navigate either direct or through organic. So you need to unlock that. So now you've got the original last click picture, you've got the less wrong picture, and you share that. And when you share that, you say, Hey, these are the insights that we've come out with. This is that CTV is actually performing 10 times better than we thought it was. We thought that CTV on a cost per sale basis was costing us $500 per sale, which is ridiculous. We can't afford to spend any more money on CTV at $500 a sale, but we now found out that it's 50 cents per sale. Now we know there's a range. We know it's not 500, it's probably not 50 cents. It's somewhere is in this range. And let's say our allowable is three 50 per sale. The question is, is it below three 50?

(31:59):

We need to do some experiments to find out. And you get your team and the marketing team and the board to go along with that. And then you devote some dollars to do tests to actually figure out, and you don't want to do a statewide test that's too broad. Pick some cities where you have existing sales and history with and go in and blanket that city with CTV or whatever ones you're testing, and then look at it and you'll probably find that it's going to be a lot closer to 50 cents than $500. Then you come back next month or two months later after the test is done and you show the results and it's like, wow. And that accesses, it erases, and now they have a new view. They now have a replaced view of metrics. And then you can use those new version of metrics that you'll update every week or every month that you get shared upstairs to the C level. That becomes the new view in the organization, and you leave the click world behind because it's not accurate. It's more wrong than this approach, let's put it that way.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:05):

It's directionally right. I like the more wrong piece because you're right, you can't get a hundred percent anytime and it's just directionally right, and it gives you an idea of how to inform your overall strategy. Exactly. So I'm hearing a lot of people talking about clean rooms. A lot of organizations are building them, are using things like Amazon Marketing Cloud because they can't build them themselves. Talk a bit about how Clean Rooms can help brands, how they might be thinking about them to get all of this data in one place and figure out where they should test it. Learn.

Jeff Greenfield (33:39):

So lean rooms are awesome. The problem is, is that the Clean Room from one organization where you're sharing data with Walmart, let's say, so you can go and set up a clean room through Amazon Marketing Cloud, set it up and start targeting your customers and lookalike customers of your customers on walmart.com, on target.com, but you're not going to be able to take those lookalike customers on walmart.com when they go to the New York Times and get them to come to your site that you're not going to be able to do. So it's perfect for this last mile, if you will, this retail media, and it's great, and it becomes part of less about your acquisition strategy for new customers, but more about your way to really access your CRM. I see these data clean rooms, if you will, as the direct mail of the future. It's a way of saying, Hey, I've got customers that I know are on walmart.com.

(34:42):

I want them to remember to add my stuff to their shopping cart so you can get them right when they're at that checkout point, which is great. So that's really what Clean rooms are for. Now. Eventually, maybe all these folks will come together, but I don't see a future where Walmart, Disney, the WWE Meta and TikTok all come together and Amazon and all share data together. That's not going to work. And the reason for that is not because of privacy, because all of these companies have what they call walled gardens. They are their own entity, and the minute they allow you to take the targeted information where you find your customer there and bring it over there, at that point, they're not going to be able to charge the CPMs and the rates that they do. So that's the issue here. And listen, you have to applaud these large companies.

(35:41):

They've gone along with privacy and they have found a way to say, Hey, the stronger we make our walls, the more profit we're going to have because we're keeping all of our data internal, and unfortunately, the heavy lift is on the large brands to go forward with clean rooms. Now, luckily, clean rooms, that whole process is getting much, much easier than it ever did, and a year or two from now, it's even going to be easier. But I wouldn't look at it as an acquisition strategy because a lot of those folks, you're going to be targeting them are going to be very lower funnel. Think about it, they're shopping already, they're buying stuff, they're adding something to their shopping cart, and you want to conquest them. It's just like Google Pay per Click. It's very lower funnel. What that means is those dollars are going to be very, your media's going to be very expensive, and that's why you still want to focus on upper funnel because that's a better long-term brand building strategy.

Peter Crosby (36:42):

Well, Jeff, thank you so much. I mean, this whole podcast has been kind of a wake up call for this, is it 2024, forget what everyone else has told you now it's happening. And to know that there are things that your clients and others are being successful at by starting the planning, the testing, the strategy, reshaping the data, reshaping now, so that when it all has crumbled beneath us, there's a new foundation to build on with confidence. And so I appreciate you sharing all of this inside Scoop with our audience. Thank you.

Jeff Greenfield (37:23):

No, it is been my pleasure. It's happening whether people want to believe it or not. I do feel like Chicken Little sometimes saying the sky is falling, but since the beginning of the year, it has felt like that. People are starting to say, I think you're right. The sky is falling.

Peter Crosby (37:43):

Well, the company is protic prova lytics.com, and Jeff, I assume you're on LinkedIn. If people want to try and connect and get a little more info out of you, they can do it that way.

Jeff Greenfield (37:54):

Yeah, absolutely. I'll also say that folks can also go, we put together a certification program for folks at no cost to become attribution certified just because the whole world is changing. So that means all digital marketers are going to have to start rethinking, and it kind of goes along with what we've talked about, impressions about all the challenges that are happening with cookies. Folks can go to attribution certified.com or they can go to protic.com and when they go there, they'll see the link to become attribution certified. It take you maybe an hour or two and you have a certificate to put on LinkedIn, but it gives you a great new perspective on how to look at the world moving forward.

Peter Crosby (38:35):

I mean, I've always thought of our audience as certifiable, so it's good to hear that they can go for this@protic.com. Thank you so much, Jeff. My pleasure, Peter. Thanks again to Jeff for all the wisdom. Speaking of Wisdom, register today and join us live in April in Nashville for the Digital Shelf summit digital shelf summit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.