Digital advertising is at a crossroads. With 70% of UK adults now actively masking their online identities and 52% saying they prefer brands that avoid using personal data for advertising, traditional targeting methods are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
“For brands, it’s less a question of how to prepare for potential change - it’s acknowledging that change is already here,” explains Niall Moody, chief revenue officer at Nano Interactive.
This shift is measurable: third-party cookies are crumbling, with coverage expected to plateau at just 13% of online traffic. Meanwhile, privacy regulations continue to tighten, resulting in signal loss - the decreasing availability of user tracking data - and a fundamentally altered ecosystem.
“If your strategy is ‘business as usual,’ how will you avoid major disruption?” asks Moody. As this transformation accelerates and a tapestry of alternative ID solutions emerges, advertisers are pivoting toward intent-based, contextual solutions that offer a more privacy-conscious and effective way to reach consumers.
The triple forces driving privacy
Three powerful factors have propelled this evolution towards a privacy-first world: tech giants implementing tracking restrictions, legislators tightening privacy regulations and shifting consumer sentiment towards data collection practices.
“Regardless of your motivation for pursuing a privacy-first approach, you’re simultaneously addressing all three driving forces,” says Moody. “You’re mitigating regulatory risk, aligning with platform changes and meeting growing consumer expectations.”
While on the surface global uncertainties might appear to temporarily push privacy down the agenda - Meta has reportedly ‘curbed the authority’ of its internal privacy teams - consumer sentiment continues trending strongly toward data protection.
High-net-worth individuals are more risk-averse with their own data
In fact, such events in the US may lead to even greater public awareness and backlash against what is now considered an inherent right to privacy.
This growing privacy consciousness is a priority among higher-income households. Nano’s research reveals that the highest earners are 69% more likely to use private browsing modes and 65% more likely to employ VPNs than lower-income groups.
It is clear that investing in a privacy-first approach can help elevate brand appeal among premium consumers who tend to be more discerning about how their data is used.
“High-net-worth individuals, typically the audiences B2B clients task us with reaching, are more risk-averse with their own data,” Moody notes.
“Understanding that your target audience is taking steps to actively block tracking makes privacy-first approaches even more critical.”
Limitations of people-based targeting
Programmatic advertising, powered by cookie tracking, once promised to deliver crucial benefits to marketing leaders including showing “the right ad, to the right person, at the right time” through people-based targeting, says Moody.
Though this approach dominated digital advertising for years, its limitations are increasingly apparent.
When Apple’s Safari browser disabled cookies in 2020, many advertisers redirected budgets to cookie-rich environments like Chrome. Yet this workaround is rapidly becoming unsustainable as Google reportedly prepares to roll out a three way, browser-level choice between cookies, its own Privacy Sandbox solution, or opting out completely.
“We don’t believe our approach is the only way,” Moody acknowledges. “There are valuable insights in first-party data for both targeting and measurement. But using only first-party data creates scale challenges - can you actually reach enough people? The reality is inevitably moving towards a hybrid approach.”
Many leaders are also grappling with ‘junk inferences’ - an issue with profiles built on historical data and assumptions rather than real-time intent signals.
These profiles often contain information that is not only potentially outdated but can lead to inferences that are reductive in nature, or simply incorrect.
As signal loss accelerates, even once-deterministic identification methods are increasingly probabilistic in nature, forcing advertisers to rely on statistical modelling - and work with likelihoods and patterns - rather than objectively accurate data.
With these changes, the challenge isn’t just about replacing lost signals - it’s about reimagining how to find and engage new audiences effectively.
“If you keep talking to the same people in the same ways, you’re not going to grow your business,” Moody explains. “Understanding your existing customers is valuable, but targeting only those who are exactly like them limits your potential.”
AI-enhanced intent targeting
Intent targeting’s evolution is also now part of a broader industry trend, alongside tactics like attention modelling, which seeks to measure genuine user engagement rather than just clicks, and marketing mix modelling (MMM) that measures campaign effectiveness across channels. Such approaches regularly combine cutting-edge tech – often AI-led – with long-established techniques.
For example, attention often makes use of panel research, alongside increasingly advanced automated page-based or engagement metrics.
Contextual meanwhile, with the help of AI, is evolving into intent targeting, incorporating a range of data signals - everything from estimated search terms, time of day and device to placement-level performance insights.
Nano’s Intent Personas product combines all of the above with classic media research methods. Panel research double-checks that audience targeting choices are correct, while manually vetted machine learning models are used to validate the accuracy of content categorisation. Products like this are a response to the great benefits, as well as flaws, that persist in AI. One example is its widely publicised ‘hallucinations’, such as Apple Intelligence inventing false BBC news headlines.
Scaling without compromising privacy
With the rise of signal loss, brands increasingly rely on their first-party data. Alongside that shift, they face significant scaling challenges, particularly in B2B environments where targeting niche audiences may be more costly, there is limited inventory and initial audience pools tend to be smaller.
The critical issue is how to expand reach without compromising privacy principles or breaking budgets.
Moody frames the challenge using a pyramid model: “At the bottom, you have less evolved contextual approaches with massive reach but limited accuracy. At the top is first-party data - highly accurate but with limited scale. We’re working to occupy that middle ground, bringing first-party data efficacy together with ID-free scale.”
Nano’s Intent Persona’s approach includes techniques like taking seed data from panel-based research, understanding browsing behaviours, creating synthetic audiences and building segments that extend the audience while maintaining privacy principles.
The critical issue is how to expand reach without compromising privacy principles or breaking budgets
“It shouldn’t feel challenging or expensive for brands to explore post-cookie strategies,” says Moody.
“You don’t need a highly integrated platform that takes two years to get approval for. It can be as simple as using client seed data to create audience segments, then finding more of the right audiences in similar, quality environments.”
By using Nano’s ID-free Intent Personas, a leading B2B software provider gained deeper insights into sector-specific and decision-maker engagement.
The data-driven approach revealed how key stakeholders interacted with different messaging and formats.
The result: 53% uplift in click-through rate (CTR) via standard display for C-suite executives, while social extension drove a 12% increase for HR professionals - ultimately delivering a 20% overall CTR boost through social channels.
The advantage
Beyond performance benefits, intent-based approaches offer something increasingly rare in digital advertising: transparency.
By focusing on real-time consumer interests rather than invasive personal profiles, brands can create more relevant experiences while maintaining clear visibility into ad placements. This consumer-first approach delivers value to both advertisers and audiences, replacing opaque tracking mechanisms with contextual relevance.
“We’re essentially lifting the lid on the black box to offer transparency,” says Moody. “This creates more meaningful conversations with clients where they can maintain human oversight of their campaigns.”
As digital advertising demands increased transparency – the winners will be those who recognise that privacy isn’t a hurdle, but a strategic opportunity.
By embracing intent-based targeting, advertisers can achieve the scale, accuracy and performance they need while respecting the privacy consumers now demand.
To find out more please visit nanointeractive.com
Digital advertising is at a crossroads. With 70% of UK adults now actively masking their online identities and 52% saying they prefer brands that avoid using personal data for advertising, traditional targeting methods are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
"For brands, it’s less a question of how to prepare for potential change - it’s acknowledging that change is already here," explains Niall Moody, chief revenue officer at Nano Interactive.
This shift is measurable: third-party cookies are crumbling, with coverage expected to plateau at just 13% of online traffic. Meanwhile, privacy regulations continue to tighten, resulting in signal loss - the decreasing availability of user tracking data - and a fundamentally altered ecosystem.
