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Finance marketers are presented with a much-changed landscape since the one they knew before the world shut down. Gearing up for a post-covid and post-tracking world is no mean feat, especially when finance regulations around data and marketing are added to these general industry challenges. 

If the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic was the hallmark of 2020, the global vaccine rollout is shaping up to be the defining development of 2021. While this has instilled a new sense of hope across the globe, the emergence of new Covid-19 variants underscores the fact that we are not completely out of the woods yet.

After a year and a half of COVID restrictions, economic turmoil and cuts to marketing budgets, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel and a chance for marketers to return to something like ‘normal’. Vaccination programs in many parts of the world are entering their final stages and restrictions across Europe and North America are easing.

As all marketers know, personalization is critical for brands – both in acquiring new customers and driving further value from existing ones. With the emergence of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and 5G, that enable highly targeted marketing to different audiences, it is clear that brands need to personalize messages in order to stand out and connect with consumers in this increasingly competitive space.

The last few months have been deeply frustrating for travel brands. For every positive announcement around COVID-19, there has been another from the government telling the industry to slow down and lower expectations.

The Google Chrome team (more specifically the Privacy Sandbox team) has just announced that they need more time to develop the Privacy Sandbox solution in order to phase out the third-party cookie. It’s no small delay either as they need almost 2 years on top of the previous “beginning of 2022” timeline, bringing the phase out to the end of 2023.

Apple’s move with Privacy Relay has started the ball rolling on fading out the IP Address as a means to identify an individual’s location. Both Ad Exchanges and Publishers will start recording at best “approximate” IP addresses and a Location Vendor’s ability to map them to points of interest will be next to futile.

Last week at WWDC, Apple announced the iCloud Private Relay, “an iCloud+ service that prevents networks and servers from monitoring a person’s activity across the internet”. Essentially, it is a feature that adds an additional layer of privacy protection to Safari browsing on iOS15.

You may have seen popups on Facebook this winter asking you to opt-in to ad tracking. These messages were shown because Facebook is worried that they won’t be able to collect data on their app users across iPhones.

As the UK (hopefully) starts to close the door on COVID-19 restrictions on June 21st, financial brands are gearing up for a much-anticipated return to normalcy. While the timeline for a full recovery is unknown, mass vaccination efforts are gaining momentum with the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, declaring this week that the UK government has administered at least one shot of the vaccine to 72% of the adult population.