• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 25, 2022

Cookies are not slated to disappear until 2023, but marketers are already feeling the loss, judging by Cookieless World: The Shifting MarTech Landscape, a study by Loyalty Research and RepData.  

Of those polled, 84% have suffered a high or medium impact to their email marketing due to cookie depreciation, 49% describing theirs as high and 35% as medium. And 16% have reported a low impact.  

In contrast, 67% have seen their social media use affected to a high degree, and 28% to a medium extent. Moreover, 54% brands have experienced a high impact in paid search, 42% medium and 5% low. 

One respondent says, “I think email will probably be fine because they’ve already bridged the gap with the technology. You have providers that have been working on this for years and it’s a known universe.” 

The impact has been greatest later in the funnel: 44% cite the purchase/conversion stage, and 38% loyalty/retention.  

Meanwhile, 70% plan to increase their budget allocation for email, 27% significantly so. However, 83% expect to up their social media marketing spend, 30% by significant margins, and    

The average marketer uses six channels, the most popular being: 

• Organic Search/SEO—86% 
• Social Media Marketing—86% 
• Paid Search/SEM—80% 
• Over-the-Top Advertising (OTT)—57%
• Email Marketing—54% 
• Events/Tradeshows/Conferences—54%
• Partnership Marketing—53%
• Influencer Marketers—51% 
• Offline Ads/Direct Mail—27% 
• Programmatic/Ad Networks—26% 
• Podcasts—22%

There is a disparity between B2B and B2C email use: 62% of B2B marketers use it , versus 51% of B2C.  

How do they now use cookies? Among all respondents they deploy them to:

• Capture and track website activity—93% 
• Capture and track across channels with unique identifier—90%
• Retargeting—86% 
• Capture and track email activity—47% 
• Cart abandonment—38%

Drilling down, 40% of B2B respondents use cookies to track email activity, compared to 52% of B2C. 

Marketers utilize seven of the following technology systems: 

• CRM System—98% 
• Data Management Platforms—78% 
• Advertising Platforms—74%
• Account-Based Marketing Platforms—69% 
• Artificial Intelligence—67% 
• Content Management Platforms—57%
• Digital Asset Management—48% 
• Marketing Analytics/Measurement Tools—42% 
• Email Service Provider (ESP)—32%
• Interaction/Personalization Management Tools—26%

At the same time, brands are shifting their technology stakc to accommodate identification challenges: 

• Introducing New Use Cases For Artificial Intelligence—75% 
• Sunsetting our Data Management Platform (DMP)—665 
• Implementing an Account-Based Markeitng (ABM) platform—60%
• Building identity resolution algorithims—59%
• Implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP)—58% 
• Integrating First-Party Data Enrichment—53% 
• Introducing Server Side Tagging–41%
• Implementing a Consent Management Tool/System—41% 
• Introducing or moving towards a Demand Side Platform (DSP)—35%

Their biggest challenges are:

• Integrating existing systems—75%
• Integrating Marketing Technology resources (FTEs—75%
• Renegotiaitng contracts with vendors—50% 
• Establishing a centralized data storage—33%
• Establishing a centralized governance team—33%
• Moving child companies to the same technology stack—35% 
• Sunsetting duplicative systems across parent/child companies—25%

Loyalty Research and RepData surveyed 175. marketing leaders in 15 vertical industries.