Leaving the Identity Era behind for a new Mindset

Identity has been at the heart of digital marketing for decades, but increased global legislation on data privacy is changing this cornerstone of advertising online.

Of course it’s not been a smooth path, and many still rely on the identity metric in their advertising strategies.

But Peter Wallace, General Manager EMEA at GumGum, argues that the days of the Identity Era are, nonetheless, almost over, and a new Mindset Era has begun…

For the past few years, advertisers, publishers and consumers have been living through what we at GumGum call the Identity Era.

It was a time in which consumers were broadly segmented by factors such as age, gender, past purchases and browsing history, in a well-intentioned but ultimately flawed attempt to serve them ads for things they might be interested in.

So flawed, in fact, that in a 2023 survey of UK and US consumers, 66% said that the majority of digital advertising isn’t relevant to them.

Privacy-conscious consumers

One of the reasons people feel this way is that the relationship between consumers and their personal data has changed beyond recognition over the past few years.

The introduction of regulations such as GDPR in Europe and CCPA in the US has led to much greater awareness among consumers about the data trail they leave behind when they browse the web and buy products online.

Added to that, tech giants like Apple with its App Tracking Transparency framework (Google is working on its own version for Android devices) have made it easier than ever for consumers to prevent companies from collecting their personal data and using it to target them with ads.

Google’s recent about-turn on plans to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser may appear, on the face of it, to have given the Identity Era a stay of execution.

The reality, however, is that even if cookies stick around a little longer in Chrome, roughly 40% of the web is already non-addressable via third-party cookies, which have already been deprecated in several other leading browsers like Safari and Firefox.

Not to mention the fact that the segmentation cookies enable is broad-brush, and completely unreliable as a way of matching advertising to consumers’ interests.

The Mindset Era

So it’s clear that the relationship between brand and consumer needs to change. Advertising needs to work in a privacy-first way that respects the user, and also creates a match between brand and consumer that drives better outcomes for both.

To achieve this, we need to welcome new ways of operating – in short, a new era for advertising. We call this the Mindset Era.

This new way for brands to engage with consumers is especially important given the bewildering amount of choice available to today’s consumers, and the ease with which they can seek out new brands and new products in just a click or two.

The sheer ease of informed browsing has led to a steep decline in customer loyalty. Indeed, 2023 research from IPA Touchpoints suggests that 60.9% of customers actively seek out the lowest price when shopping, compared to 55% in 2020, pre-lockdown.

The same research found that 52.9% of consumers would happily switch brands in order to make use of a coupon.

So what factors contribute to someone’s mindset at any given point in time?

They are many and varied, and include a person’s location, the time of day, the weather, the content they are consuming, the score in a football match they are watching, the plot of a film they are viewing, to name but a few.



It’s a complex landscape to navigate, but when you can, it gives you a far better chance of reaching consumers in the moment with advertising that matches their current mindset and interests – advertising that resonates with the individual and drives a better outcome for the consumer, the advertiser and the publisher.

Context, attention and creative

So how do you gain this insight into the consumer’s current mindset? At GumGum, the approach we take is based on three factors: context, attention and creative.

For a number of years now, the prominence of contextual and attention has been steadily increasing; in part driven by the move to a privacy-first world, as well as the belief that these can lead to better outcomes for brands than traditional targeting and measurement methodologies from the Identity Era.

The value of creative across media channels, meanwhile, has been a mainstay of the industry for years.

And, the individual advancement of these areas has brought us to a place where we can understand content across multiple media channels as well as a human might, whilst the ability to accurately infer attention is vast.

The advancement and accuracy of these components are paramount to the success of the Mindset Era.

Where the true ability to understand Mindset comes from, however, is being able to get these elements to work in conjunction with one another.

Being able to analyse, interpret and optimise based on these signals in real time is how the Mindset Era will ultimately drive success.

Determining the relationship between multiple creative messages, contextual categories and their ultimate ability to drive attention is really how we will tap into understanding Mindset and identifying the moment when a match between brand and consumer can be made, for the benefit of both.

The Mindset approach in action

One example of the Mindset approach in action is a campaign GumGum ran for the BBC in conjunction with Havas Manchester to generate excitement around new episodes of Doctor Who to celebrate the programme’s 60th anniversary.

The campaign used high-impact desktop and mobile skin formats featuring a countdown timer to build excitement around the launch of the shows and act as a prompt to tune in.

Targeting was taken care of by GumGum contextual which targeted broad contextual categories such as entertainment, TV, movies, sci-fi and lifestyle. GumGum also used keyword targeting to align with other sci-fi shows, as well as the cast and crew of the episodes.
Finally, GumGum Attention measured the Attention Time (in seconds) for both ad formats to understand which contextual categories were delivering the greatest attention and optimising delivery in their direction.

This provided some unexpected results with contextual categories such as rugby and boxing (both topical at the time) delivering fantastic amounts of attention.

The campaign helped to deliver impressive viewing figures for the Doctor Who Christmas special. Total viewing was 40% higher than the previous series, with over eight million views.

This was significantly higher than the second highest streamed show on Netflix, Chicken Run, with 2.7m views.

It also demonstrated the power of attention as a metric.

Also published in: Mediashotz