Mourning The Third-party Cookie: Five Stages Of Grief
In the mid-1990s, third-party cookies became a popular tool among digital marketers. Although originally designed to recognize a user returning to a website, these cookies became a key means of tracking and targeting individuals across the internet.
Today, changing consumer expectations and an increasingly restrictive regulatory environment mean that targeting and measuring digital advertising via the use of third-party cookies is in decline, with Chrome set to phase out the use of third-party cookies before the end of 2024.
Advertising technology players will miss this old friend; indeed we can expect an extended period of mourning, characterized as usual by the ‘five stages of grief’: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally, Acceptance.
Denial
Given that Google has already pushed back its deadline for cookie depreciation several times, there’s still a lot of skepticism in the marketplace about when and whether they will go through with it. Strikingly, some of the major ad trading platforms seem to be among the doubters, as several have still not actively engaged in testing Google’s Privacy Sandbox alternative solutions.
As the clock ticks down on third-party cookies, we can expect to hear plenty of voices arguing that it is conceptually unnecessary or technically unworkable. Expect to hear this loudest from AdTech intermediaries who have benefited from the existing data regimes and the fragmentation of our pipeline.
In this case, as usual, denial is not a strong strategy.
Expert Views on Google’s 1% Third-Party Cookie Deprecation
We can be confident that regulators will see through self-oriented representations, and will not allow a cynical “silent boycott” to trump the legitimate privacy concerns motivating this change.
Anger
After denial comes… Rage!
Here manifests as anger at Google, who are accused of using the excuse of privacy to manipulate the advertising market to their advantage.
In this case, the accusation of self-interest is less unfair than misconstructed.
If Google were interested in capturing or damaging the third-party advertising business, the much simpler path would have been to follow Apple in eliminating the identity and conversion signals that power advanced advertising. Instead, Google has invested huge resources in developing an alternative called Privacy Sandbox which supports most advanced advertising tactics in a privacy-protecting way. This is, in fact, very much in Google’s self-interest, not as some cynical play to grow their medium-sized third-party advertising business, but rather as a sincere effort to support the ecosystem of open web publishers who are the foundation of their massive search business.
Bargaining
Okay, okay, perhaps we DO have to get rid of the cookie?
Well, how about we just replace this mechanism with one or more Alternative IDs that allow for the continuation of cross-site tracking?
This particular Bargain has become very popular, and many well-intentioned marketers will spend time in 2024 integrating an Alternative ID – forgetting that the privacy considerations driving cookie deprecation are not about the cookie per se but rather the cross-site tracking it enables, which Alternative IDs promise to perpetuate in an even more opaque and unmanageable form. Cookie alternatives that increase the risks to consumer privacy will not last long.
Depression
When change is coming, anger is spent, and escape is thwarted, things can feel pretty bleak.
Indeed Depression has already arrived for many in Ad Tech through lower trading multiples and subdued investor sentiment. In particular, companies that rely heavily on cross-site tracking have serious cause for concern. But, those that don’t, and that have the financial strength to survive this transition, can look forward to an exciting period of creative destruction.
Top Cookie Management News: AppsFlyer Launches Privacy Sandbox on Android for the Mobile Market
Acceptance
The process ends of course with Acceptance and with Hope. In this case, there is an additional dividend to Acceptance, in that companies who engage meaningfully now have a real chance to shape the privacy-enhancing technologies that will replace the cookie.
Now is the time for the industry to stop grieving the cookie and move quickly to ‘acceptance’. It’s time for publishers, advertisers, and ad tech companies to dry their eyes and instead actively prepare for a digital marketing world based primarily on first-party signals and privacy-enhancing technology.
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