Thought Leadership

On a bleak, chilly and rain-soaked morning in late 2024, a funeral service is being held in a cemetery somewhere on the outskirts of Silicon Valley.

Big tech execs, performance brands, and marketers huddle under black umbrellas to pay their respects to a promising life cut short.

The 3rd party cookie has died.

But there’s someone noticeably absent. The creative industry. As a betting man, I’d guess they were celebrating.

It’s been 15 years since Facebook launched its ad products and heralded the dawn of a new age of advertising effectiveness.

What has followed has been a decade and a half where we’ve been so focused on performance and promotion we’ve forgotten the necessity of persuasion.

This obsession with the delivery of advertising to consumers has meant we’ve neglected the intuitive breakthroughs of yesteryear that made advertising work with consumers.

Maybe that’s because advertising, for the most part, is the dark arts of probables and likelihoods. Saying the same thing enough in an entertaining and memorable way so that maybe, just maybe, someone will buy it one day (when they’re actually ready to buy it).

Which is pretty much a direct conflict with the promise of exactness and efficiency of digital and performance.

With both sides of marketing tending to gravitate towards what’s shiny and new, perhaps, now is the time to pause and get back to some of the basics and regain the attention and, indeed, affection of the buying public. After all, we’ve now got access to marketing science literature to help shape and defend persuasive thinking.

I believe the way forward is a bit of both. Of the timeless proven practices of effectively growing brands balanced with new-school media thinking to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

Especially for those brands who’ve hacked growth and have maxed out on performance advertising. Without the resources of the large sized companies who will be able to effectively access and leverage first party data, these others will now need to reorientate and consider the longer term, slower play of brand marketing as well.

But for many this will come with a huge challenge. Growth marketers lack the experience of building a brand and managing that journey with stakeholders who have become accustomed to immediate results.

Take eco-cleaning brand, Koh, who launched their first ever TV campaign since launching in 2016. The result is a kind of confused brand/retail spot which doesn’t create any memorable distinction for consumers. It’s focused on the problem (people don’t like to be reminded of their problems) instead of the solution and lacks the craft of getting the message across in as simple and efficient a way as possible.

Now compare it to this Mr Clean ad which probably has a similar insight. It’s steamy and attention grabbing, funny, has a story, a great use of their distinctive brand asset, no time wasted.

Whatever the case, we should applaud Koh for taking the step forward and realising that longer growth as an area for investment. What their example does is shine a light on the timeless principles of marketing science that can’t be neglected when investing in a brand and that shit delivered at the speed of light is still shit.

For those of us working in the creative industry, let’s not mourn the passing of third party cookies too greatly. Yes, it’s time to reignite the flames of persuasion and craftsmanship in advertising for longevity rather than the quick fix. But we must remind ourselves, that it was perhaps our too slow adoption of digital that opened the door to the influx of short term thinking in the first place. So let’s raise our umbrellas not in sorrow, but in celebration, where quality triumphs over quantity, where there’s a healthy mix of old and new, long and short and where impactful messaging resonates long after the rain has cleared.

Whatever the case, we should applaud Koh for taking the step forward and realising that longer growth as an area for investment. What their example does is shine a light on the timeless principles of marketing science that can’t be neglected when investing in a brand and that shit delivered at the speed of light is still shit.

For those of us working in the creative industry, let’s not mourn the passing of third party cookies too greatly. Yes, it’s time to reignite the flames of persuasion and craftsmanship in advertising for longevity rather than the quick fix. But we must remind ourselves, that it was perhaps our too slow adoption of digital that opened the door to the influx of short term thinking in the first place. So let’s raise our umbrellas not in sorrow, but in celebration, where quality triumphs over quantity, where there’s a healthy mix of old and new, long and short and where impactful messaging resonates long after the rain has cleared.

Read the article on B&T →