The following is an op-ed from Jordan Cohen, CMO of Fluent.
There was a big story out in the Wall Street Journal last week, suggesting that Google is preparing to roll out a custom audiences offering similar to Facebook’s.
For those unfamiliar with customer audiences, there’s a short, simple description of the program on Facebook’s website. Essentially, custom audiences enable advertisers to send encrypted files of their email marketing lists to Facebook, and then re-target those individuals through Facebook ads. Facebook then additionally targets ads to “lookalikes” (people who have commonalities with individuals on the marketer’s email housefile).
What the Journal story failed to mention is the real underlying reason that Google (and other major digital media companies) are starting to roll out email-based targeting, which is the frailty of traditional cookie-based targeting in mobile environments. In most cases, cookies don’t function properly in mobile browsers, and they don’t work at all in Apple’s mobile Safari browser, which accounts for >50% of the mobile web browsing market.
