Horizons Newsletter – week 16 // 2021
Horizons is a bi-monthly Dasym Research initiative to show you how the Dasym themes have been in the news. We publish the Horizons on our website and as an email newsletter. If you wish to receive the email, please contact Investor Relations.
Do you have a question about the digitalization of consumer’s daily lives? As a research-driven investment company, we want to be relevant to you, so please provide us with your questions and remarks. Your feedback will help us to drive our research agenda.
Digital advertising in a post-cookie world
As Google is phasing out cookies on Chrome and Apple is making the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) opt-in, the online advertising landscape is slowly moving to a post-cookie world. An improvement after almost two decades of minimally effective online marketing and a strong invasion of the privacy of uninformed or ignorant consumers. The industry is already on its way to finding alternatives that bundle behavioral data across sites and apps, such as Unified ID 2.0. Furthermore, as first-party data and alternative identifiers such as email and phone number become more relevant, Google, Facebook and Amazon are strengthening their advertising triopoly. Part of their plans is to create more privacy-friendly advertising tools, for instance by using cohorts instead of individuals to target audiences. Another alternative to cookie-based ads is the (partial) return to the roots of advertising: contextual targeting. These ads target people based on the context of what they are looking at instead of their (online click) behavior. Compared to behavioral ads, contextual ads are a very appealing, safe, and cost efficient solution in a privacy-friendly world.
Broaden your horizon?
In this section we share content that may be of interest to you:
- Healthcare will see big macro-changes in the coming two years. A report from Dealroom, INKEF Capital and MTIP explores the next big things in health innovation and what the future of healthcare might look like.
- While tech companies were already interested in healthcare, the pandemic has proven the value of technology to healthcare delivery. The acquisition of voice-recognition company Nuance Communications shows Microsoft’s prowess in voice recognition and is giving it further leverage in the health care market.
- This Bloomberg article argues that the term ‘technology’ has becomes a catchall that companies are all too willing to co-opt if it lends some luster.
Europe’s deep transition strategy
A lot has been written about the unfolding European Digital Strategy to reclaim the digital sphere from private interests and make it more equitable and fair. Moreover, the E.U. also wants to become a regulatory superpower in the non-digital realm. This month, for example, the European Parliament paved the way for new legislation that stresses corporate accountability and due diligence for human rights within value chains. Furthermore, the European Central Bank aspires to become a pioneer in fighting climate change: by slashing bond purchases by heavy carbon emitters, advancing green bonds, and integrating climate risk in its stress tests for the banking sector. In addition, the E.U. adopted new ‘eco-design measures’ that should make it easier to repair rather than replace old household appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators. All these measures are meant to create more equitable and sustainable consumer practices, production processes, and value chains in the real economy. As such, the E.U. is leveraging the ‘Brussels Effect’ to begin to establish the meta-rules of the second deep transition.
