If you work in marketing and advertising, then it is unlikely you can spend more than two minutes on LinkedIn without having an article, post, or personal proclamation about the end of third-party cookies appear in your newsfeed.

While Google has delayed dropping the third-party cookie from Chrome until 2024, the likes of Safari and Firefox have already cancelled them. We are in a cookie vs. cookie-free ecosystem with the balance of power shifting towards the latter every day.

Marketing tactics still rooted in the third-party cookie mean chasing an ever-shrinking audience while ignoring a growing group of prospects that could be signalling intent for a company’s products and services. Inuvo, which specializes in artificial intelligence solutions targeted towards advertisers, says it sees this every day. According to its trading team, more than 75% of all available ad auctions do not contain a cookie.

This should be a wakeup call to marketers. As cookie-free browsers enjoy increasing market share, the tactics available to marketers will continue to shrink.

“Marketers are no longer able to utilize many of the targeting tactics previously available,” explains Victor Genova, Inuvo’s senior sales director for Canada. “With simple things like retargeting no longer possible, we need to accept that KPIs will change. This is programmatic advertising’s great reset. In many respects, we’re going back to the beginning.”

While it is beneficial for marketers to understand who their customers are, in the absence of the cookie it has become more difficult to reach people based on demographic data.

Enter Inuvo, pioneers of IntentKey, a patented, artificial intelligence-powered advertising solution that focuses on why people buy rather than who they are. The company describes the traditional method of targeting as “who-based marketing” – tactics rooted in demographic data, which is quickly being replaced with more effective “why-based marketing” that targets based on real-time consumer intent regardless of who the individual is.

IntentKey doesn’t care who you are. It’s concerned with why you’re online within a given moment. Do your online actions suggest purchase intent? For example, is someone on a car site seriously considering a purchase? Or are they a car aficionado who regularly reads about automobiles without the motivation to buy? There is a big difference between the two. If you’re an automotive OEM, chances are you’re wasting budget on car enthusiasts who aren’t in-market for a vehicle.

Inuvo’s IntentKey identifies audiences signaling intent in real-time, maximizing effectiveness to push customers further down the funnel to the point of conversion.

Inuvo’s engineering team trained IntentKey to understand 25 million intent signals. The AI understands content, theme and sentiment among other nuances in a way that a human can.

“It understands combinations and permutations of words, sentences, and sentence structures.” Genova explains. “We’ve trained the AI to read and understand content like a human.”

Data freshness has always been an industry concern. The cookie can go back weeks or months, but if you’re promoting something timelier, it’s important to reach individuals when they’re in-market.

“Our research shows 80% of conversions happen within the first two hours of expressed intent behaviour,” he says. “That’s when someone is online thinking, ‘Here’s the problem I need to solve.’ The IntentKey has its finger on the pulse of what people are doing online at any given moment.”

Genova offers a simple scenario: You’re planning a trip. You have 15 browser tabs open for airline, hotel and review sites. Regardless of your identity, the IntentKey knows you are online planning a vacation (and where, when, and how), and it can serve the right ad at the right time to complement your experience and help with decision-making. It is not an interruption; it’s the right message in the right place at the right time.

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the industry is that it has been thinking about this the wrong way until now. Was compromising user privacy to get what we needed just the lazy way of doing things?

If we have the tools to create a deeper understanding of user behaviour, and which allow us to problem solve on a more meaningful level, there’s no reason to keep checking to see if the sky is falling. We can just let our evolution continue.

Victor Genova is the senior director of sales, Canada at Inuvo

For more information please contact – victor.genova@inuvo.com