The writing was on the wall for a while. But as Google's third-party cookies finally start to degrade, advertisers are finally having to address the cookie-size hole in their targeting strategies. This hole was something Red Robin's CMO Kevin Mayer had been considering before he took over last May.
The 54-year-old restaurant chain has been working on its “Northstar” five-point plan for the past year, part of which includes revamping its marketing and advertising to get in front of Gen Z consumers through digital screens. It is. The heritage brand has worked to build its customer base, especially among younger shoppers, even as increased data privacy efforts make digital marketing more difficult for marketers.
“The brand used to be more of a scattered TV, national broadcast type of advertiser,” Mayer said. “We are now a targeted, behavioral advertiser.”
Since taking on the CMO role, Mayer has spent time upgrading Red Robin's digital media as a means to drive business growth, he said. That means the restaurateur is now focused on its own data and third-party data. As part of his five-point plan for Red Robin, it seems easy enough to conquer his first-party data and also includes building a loyalty program. However, with the rollout of Google's third-party cookies, third-party data is proving more complex for most advertisers looking for alternative channels to target and acquire customers.
As the burger chain looks to cast a wider net to target and capture more shoppers, it is using “unified ID-like targeting,” or alternative identifiers created from email addresses and phone numbers; The focus is on similarity modeling rather than cookie tracking, he said. Added.
“We use some of your program data with Google. [some] “Some of the people who served the ads have been to the restaurant, but that's only part of the puzzle,” Mayer said. “But we think that using all of these things together is a way to really understand how effective our marketing is.”
Meyer said Red Robin has been working on its data strategy with agency partner Apiary Digital since last September.
Rather than taking a wait-and-see approach to see if Google will bother advertisers, some marketers are starting to test alternatives to third-party cookies. However, there is hesitation because experiments involve a degree of uncertainty.
“There are a lot of different solutions on the market,” said Rachel Ganz, managing director of programmatic advertising company Proximic by Comscore. “Uniform identifiers or alternative identifiers are definitely something brands are looking at. While great, there are still limits to scale.”
It's unclear what Red Robin's media spending will be, as Meyer did not provide specific details. According to MediaRadar, Red Robin invested a whopping 93% of its monthly ad spend into digital display ads last month. The remaining 7% of his money was spent on paid social and mobile advertising. According to Vivvix, the company spent more than $7 million on advertising from January 2023 to November 2023, including paid social data from Pathmatics. This number is significantly lower than the $21.3 million spent during the same period in 2022.
Google's third-party decline, along with Apple's ATT, which has disrupted targeted advertising on mobile devices, is another step into an uncertain future. There's no crystal ball from which advertisers can plan for a cookie-free future, but Ganz says supplements will be the game going forward.
Regardless of alternative identifiers, there are almost always challenges such as scale and scope. To create the same comprehensive customer database as third-party cookies, advertisers will need to combine different solutions, he added.
“Brands are looking for consistent audience reach, targeting, and definition, but the tactics to get there need to be complementary to a variety of tactics, each with associated challenges.” she stated.
Ten years ago, Red Robin considered itself a leader in casual dining. Since then, the brand “has lost its way a little bit,” Mayer said. To get back on track, restaurants are ramping up their digital media efforts. Mayer said it's unclear, at least for now, whether that will be accompanied by an increase in marketing budgets.
“One day. Right now we're focused on leveraging what we have and making it work even better,” he said. “We're starting to gain some confidence in our marketing metrics and traffic, but who knows where we'll go from there.”
