It’s a nerve-racking time to be a marketer. After being the driving force that sparked new digital strategies for businesses amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns, marketers now face a new set of daunting pressures posed by artificial intelligence, uncertain economic conditions, and an evolving data privacy landscape — three “existential threats” ironically, pointed out to me by a certain popular natural language processing AI. Privacy is a novel challenge, and its importance has only continued to grow as regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have increased alongside consumer expectations. One profound implication for marketers is that third-party cookies will be phased out by Google by 2024. This is a seismic shift in our industry that will make it harder to be a “data-driven marketer,” considering over half of marketers rely on third-party cookies as their primary source of information on website visitors. Marketers need to rethink how we.
