For many years, advertisers could run brand campaigns across the web, use third-party cookies to track people over dozens of websites, and then justify the expenses with a multi-touch attribution model based on blurry data. This is no longer possible. And the only marketers having a tough time are the ones who relied entirely on that. The ones not having a tough time are the ones who returned to the roots of everything, direct response, measurable results, and ads which are made to get people to act immediately.
What Actually Collapsed and Why it Matters
The entire programmatic adtech stack, processing 25m+ auctions a second based on thousands of data points for each impression served, was predicated on the ability to count an ad as having been delivered if it enters the viewport, compromising on screen real estate, or without even appearing to register with a consumer. Ads were considered “viewed” just for getting spit out onto a webpage and counted as “viewable” if more than 50% of the pixels had loaded for a certain amount of time. Bidders then competed for the chance to be the ad that got this non-view in an auction exponentially more complicated than just picking the highest bid. Ads the size of a single pixel were served and traded under the assumption that their view had some discernible impact on brand awareness.
Why Direct Response Bypasses the Privacy Problem Entirely
Direct response marketing has never depended on surveillance. Its premise is that you make an offer to someone at a particular moment that compels them to take action or not. The results are immediate. The response is direct. You don’t have to track someone over time to determine if they bought something.
That’s why direct response is resurgent. It has no need for massive databases of all your behavior all the time, no need to track you from site to site, no need for third-party data at all. A direct response ad either makes the phone ring or it doesn’t. A direct response pitch either gets you to the site or it doesn’t. It succeeds or fails then and there, not in some all-seeing database.
Direct response, done digitally, is also very easy to optimize. Since the desired response is so focused, testing new creative is quick and reliable. You know pretty soon if it’s driving more calls and more clicks. Which is nothing like the brand marketing game, where you find out in eighteen months that a third fewer people mentioned your product in a survey. Because that creative turnover is so fast, copywriters often keep lightweight idea tools handy — even a free pun generator (https://punmagazine.com/pun-generator) — to spin punchy hook and headline variations to test.
The Shift to Contextual Relevance
When it becomes impossible to follow users as they browse the web, the next best option is to just pay attention to what they’re doing now. Contextual targeting, placing ads based on the content of the page a user is looking at, doesn’t depend on personal data in the first place. If someone is reading an article about home gym equipment, they’re revealing their current interest in that topic.
This also has some fundamental advantages over behavioral ads that go beyond privacy concerns. A person who is actually reading some relevant content is likely to be more receptive to an offer related to that content. This is a warmer lead than someone who clicked on a fitness article a few days ago but has since been reading about housing rates, football scholarships, and vacation packages. Contextual relevance is also present-tense relevance. This is a much better signal for direct response advertising.
For advertisers, it also minimizes the surveillance concerns that some users express upon being served an ad that is clearly based on their browsing history. If nothing else, a contextually placed ad should feel like it’s just an ad that is right there on the page they are reading anyway. This is a better starting point for any conversion-focused message.
The Resurgence of High-Impact Ad Formats
One of the clearest signals that direct response is back is what’s happening to ad format preferences. Programmatic display networks, with their pastel banner ads and below-the-fold placements, are losing ground to formats that actually command attention.
Pop-ups and pop-unders are the clearest example. These formats fell out of fashion during the behavioral tracking era partly because sophisticated retargeting seemed like a more elegant solution. But retargeting is now severely constrained, and the pop format has qualities that more passive display formats simply don’t have. It takes over the screen. It forces a decision. It can’t be ignored the way a banner ad can.
This is why pop up ads advertising formats are being used by performance marketers to capture immediate user focus on publisher sites where contextual relevance already exists, without any dependency on third-party cookies. The format is compliant by design, because it doesn’t need to know who you are. It just needs to put the right offer in front of someone who’s already in the right context.
Push notifications operate on a similar logic. A user who has opted into push notifications from a publisher or ad network has given explicit consent to be reached. That’s first-party or zero-party data at its most direct, they raised their hand. Sending a direct-response message to someone who has actively opted in to receive communications is about as clean a permission-based model as exists in digital advertising. Re-engagement rates for opted-in push subscribers are consistently higher than for retargeted display audiences, and the audience is fully consented by definition.
Performance Pricing Models and Budget Protection
Reverting to direct response also means a different kind of advertising economy. While during the behavioral tracking period a vast amount of advertising spend went into the top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel consideration stages, real-time bidding and programmatic guaranteed are designed to price by the impression, reach, and frequency. These are fuzzy, indirect indicators and they’re not about to droop; multi-touch attribution modeling also uses them to assign pseudo-credit to each impression in a convoluted path to a final sale.
But while the puck is nowhere near the goal, it doesn’t cost you anything to slap it. Behavior tracking has had a good run; now it’s just near its conclusion, with advertising in the US and Europe being deprecated, blocked, challenged in courts, and outlawed. We can sweat it out for a decade with fraud, arguing about whether scams count as performance if the bots properly engaged with the content, and no one but the bad actors gets paid. Or not.
Performance pricing perks up as an alternative: the risk is reversed and the advertiser only pays for an actual action. This is the underlying principle of the affiliate network: the network introduces advertisers to publishers who are paid a fraction of the sale that they’ve driven through their direct actions. If none are driven, no payment changes hands. This model of payment isn’t new; direct response and affiliate marketing have been happening that way since the 80s. The novelty is that it now appears more appealing than the potential solutions of the last decade, as we have noted that the technology capable of tracking performance has reached its functional limits.
Budget discipline is a consequence: when every dollar you spend has to reflect a measurable action, it’s a lot harder to write a check for vague awareness.
Building Data Assets Directly From Your Audience
Although we’ve seen the collapse of behavioral targeting, the demand for audience data is greater than ever. The difference is in how that data has to be sourced. First-party data, the data you collect directly from users who’ve engaged with your brand, is now the central data asset for sophisticated advertisers. Zero-party data, where users proactively provide information (relevant details, for instance, via a survey, quiz, or interactive form), goes even further, and uniquely comes with the blessing of having the consent given directly.
Direct response formats are very conducive to both. A lead-capture form, an interactive quiz that leads to a product recommendation, an opt-in with real value, these are direct response mechanics that also serve to gather data. Every conversion that passes through one of these mechanics builds a compliant, first-party audience that you can contact directly via email, SMS, or push without needing any third-party infrastructure.
It’s a real structural advantage for brands that go out to build this kind of asset. The companies that spent the last decade buying audience access through programmatic channels own very little. The companies that spent the last decade obtaining direct opt-ins from subscribers own something that no privacy regulation can take away from them.
Rewriting the Metrics That Matter
The final tweak that direct response advertising needs to thrive is a fundamental shift in campaign goals. Marketers will need to transition from relying on large, inferred audience segments to specific behaviors and timely creative. The “spray and pray” approach brought the ad tech stack to new heights of complexity. With most of the spray taking the form of shady data practices and the pray mostly centering on God choosing the right person to be browsing Google when that blessed request to look at a product’s website entered his or her omniscient mind.
The successor to this mess is much simpler, direct response to a specific call to action, with transparent reporting on whether that action took place. Did you visit the site? Did you hand over your email for 10% off? Did you buy something? Not guesses, not inferred probabilities, not whether the exact audience was hidden deep in six different ad networks you purchased from, whether you did the thing.
Google search is the quintessential example of this form, which is why their ads are consistently the most effective. Someone clearly wants something right now. Answering that desire constitutes a useful marketing service, not a bothersome infringement. The issue is the need to focus nearly all your digital budget on Google due to their unique position granting them the only reliable behavioral data. However, a couple of affiliated websites and the world’s most valuable app in the hands of billions of people also share that behavioral data; we won’t get another world where literally zero impression of a Chuck E. Cheese’s logo bides its time inside the machine waiting to haunt our every step.
