Recent moves to eliminate marketing cookies have introduced challenges to life sciences commercial operations teams trying to implement effective campaigns. And while today’s commercial tool ecosystem captures interactions well, identifying the patient, healthcare physician (HCP), hospital, health system, integrated delivery network (IDN), or accountable care organization (ACO) that may be a prospective customer remains a challenge. Along with binding regulations and strict privacy guidelines, it is difficult to build an action or response for each customer touchpoint when customers remain unidentified.
To fully understand the impact of a cookieless world, we must first understand how cookies differ from master data. Typically, there are two ways to map and profile customer identity data. Master data leverages multiple databases that hold first-, second-, and third-party data, while operational data consists of first-party and third-party cookie data generated during transactional events.
Master data includes fully fleshed-out customer information. Operational data stitches together unidentified profiles by tracking and storing first- and third-party cookies across provider or patient websites. These website cookies are crucial to corroborating interactions and developing a fingerprint for each customer that helps identify new campaign targets.
Cookies are files created by the websites we visit. Their primary purpose is to provide customers with a seamless online experience by saving browsing information that makes it easy to pick up where we left off when we return to the site. Cookies remember our site preferences, such as shopping cart items, and provide locally relevant content.
There are two main types of cookies:
First-party cookies are crucial in helping site owners collect customer analytics data, remember language settings, and provide a good user experience. They are usually classified as “strictly necessary” or “essential” cookies that do not need user consent.
Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are important because they help serve ads on a web page, conduct cross-site tracking, and support retargeting to display relevant ads while the customer moves across websites. These cookies are classified as preference or “functional” cookies, statistics or “performance” cookies, and marketing or “advertising” cookies. They require user consent before they can be captured and deployed.
Customers have no doubt seen some of these terms before. Many sites and apps now display an option asking users to give or deny permission when they first visit a site. The challenge today is that, due to rising data privacy concerns, many browsers have started to block the creation of third-party cookies by default. This ban limits a marketer’s ability to influence customer engagement through retargeting, as users now have the option to decline consent for third-party cookies.
Beyond device and browser restrictions, new regulatory changes are prompting a sea change in the ability of life sciences companies to leverage third-party cookies. Pivotal events that led to these changes are shown below (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Rise of a Cookieless World: Five Key Events.
The regulations and compliance issues above have forced the life sciences industry to be even more careful than other industries when managing personally identifiable information (PII).
Companies typically rely on two fundamental approaches to managing personal data:
Most third-party cookie data will not be available in the future because of general privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCNA, browser clampdowns such as Apple’s ITP and Google’s PSC, and life sciences-specific compliances such as HIPAA. Companies will not be able to precisely identify a customer during real-time activity, making precise targeting difficult and impacting the life sciences’ ability to engage customers in the following ways:
Customer Insights
Omnichannel Activation
Engagement Measurement
Losing the ability to develop a full-identity view of the customer will also have a detrimental effect on entire campaigns. Leveraging cookie-synchronization across sites or platforms will be reduced in the planning phases, making it difficult to create a unified view of an individual’s activity. Further, Apple and Google are using device masking on internet protocol (IP) addresses to limit or eliminate the ability to fingerprint across channels, making it hard to link a user’s additional online activities or determine their precise location.
During a campaign, reaching audiences on a one-to-one or geographic basis will become a challenge since the programmatic delivery of media relies on third-party cookies. Gathering inputs for frequency capping (number of campaign exposures) and bidding optimization (advertising dollar spend) will make optimizing campaigns during implementation increasingly difficult.
And finally, hurdles will appear in the post-campaign phase as well. Retargeting uses cookies extensively. Without them, following up with audiences one-on-one won't be easy. Identifying digital media exposure and measuring ROI for promotional spends versus end prescriptions will also become problematic.
Life sciences companies have started responding to the cookie challenge in creative ways, including the following three major initiatives. Detailed components and examples are provided. Leveraging these solutions allows commercial companies to brace for impact while having a clear strategy to deal with a post-cookie world:
Identity Initiatives
Targeting Initiatives
Attribution Initiatives
It is no secret that more and more customer data is generated every day, and stringent regulations and privacy concerns limit how this data can be leveraged for commercial purposes. The gradual phasing out of third-party cookies means that, in the future, life sciences companies will need to rely more heavily on first-party and consent-driven data.
The main goal is to start adopting platforms and partners that provide quick and efficient first-party data preparation and provisioning and to change how targeting, measurement, and attribution will be used to review campaign performance. Knowing that their personal data is fully secure and used for preference-driven interactions that are meaningful to them is bound to increase customers’ confidence in and willingness to engage with brands in a meaningful way.