For most Australians, cookies are already irrelevant

Written by
Tori McBride

17 Feb, 2022

Everyone is talking about the demise of the cookie in 2023, but many Australians are living in that cookieless future already, with millions now using devices and browsers where cookies are disabled. Aussies love their iPhones –– Apple’s market dominance grew to 45.7% of all phones sold in the first half of 2021 and these mobile users are most often using Safari, where cookies are disabled by default.

Rather than losing valuable audiences that are using their iPhones to browse and interact with brands, brands need to figure out how to reach them where they are –– because the cookie is almost extinct, and pretty soon everywhere will start to look a lot like a Safari browser. FiftyAurora offers one way to target these already cookieless consumers, helping brands reach Australians today and drive performance uplift.

Cookies? Good riddance

While many companies are looking for alternatives to cookies, such as anonymised digital identifiers or boosting their first-party data capabilities, both have their problems. Cookies by another name may not satisfy people’s feeling that they are being followed on the web. Consented data, meanwhile, does not offer the scale of insights that brands need to grow.

At Fifty, we do not believe you need digital identifiers to target an audience and create an effective campaign. By marrying social audience insight with our next-generation contextual engine, FiftyAurora, you can create performance uplift within mobile browsers without cookies.

Insights + Contextual = Super-charged Performance

Everything we do at Fifty starts with audience insight. Using publicly available social data, we can build an understanding about a target audience. This is not about where they have been on the web (which is effectively what cookies help define) but about who they are. If you understand who your audience is, you can build a more holistic picture of them and create campaigns that more effectively resonate with them.

We combine this audience insight with our contextual engine, to rank pages. It offers more nuance than traditional contextual targeting based on keywords, and the privacy that cookies lack.

Our ability to understand audiences has already begun to outperform cookies. We were recently enlisted to help a client find new customers. Our ability to unearth their audiences' unique passions and interests enabled us to build hyper-relevant campaigns that delivered results. For the Australian campaign, Fifty’s cookieless segments doubled the click-through rate (CTR) achieved with cookies; 33% higher than the client’s benchmark.

Australians are already offering marketers a hint at what the cookieless future will look like. Apple Safari users are valuable customers that make up a major cohort of today’s consumer. They deserve to have relevant and resonant advertising and brands need the ability to target them effectively while still protecting their privacy. FiftyAurora does just that.

For more on how Fifty can help uplift performance on your campaigns, get in touch or book a demo today.

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