Preparing for a Cookie-Less World

Some channels (e.g. programmatic display) will be more affected than others but the whole industry is about to experience a seismic shift. Whilst the full effects are being debated, and new solutions offered, examples of areas that are likely to be affected include:

 Multi Touch and View Through Attribution

 Retargeting

 Targeting using 3rd party data sources

 Tracking of ad frequency

 Ability to use sequential creative

 Ad personalisation

Instead of relying on 3rd party data, the advertisers that learn to track, segment, and activate their 1st Party Data will lead the pack. 1st party data will be king in the new era of the of the internet.

Inevitably the big ad-tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) with their walled gardens of logged in users will be least affected and no doubt advertisers will likely be further pushed to using their data that simply won’t be available elsewhere. These companies also have the scale to ensure that measurement alternatives using modelling will be highly accurate.

Targeting methods that are not reliant on 3rd party cookies like contextual targeting & publisher direct buying (e.g. PMPs etc) will become more widely used. Likewise, channels already less reliant on cookies will flourish e.g. Connected TV.

Finally, the way we track, target and measure performance will change significantly. New privacy first measurement/targeting solutions are being put forward daily and it is the responsibility of all digital marketers to stay up to date and be part of the conversation. Some examples of these solutions include:

Google Privacy Sandbox:

This is Google Chrome's proposed replacement to 3rd party cookies. It contains several solutions that cover everything from ad fraud to audience targeting in a privacy centric way. An example of this is FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) that allows interest-based targeting by clustering large groups of people with similar interests (rather than targeting individual users).

Unified ID:

A partnership between key ad tech players (incl. Tradedesk, LiveRamp, Criteo & Nielsen) that aims to use encrypted and hashed email addresses to create a standardised identity replacement for 3rd party cookies. Scale is potentially an issue with this solution.

Data Clean Rooms

These cloud-based solutions are secure places where walled gardens can share event level data with marketers to link their proprietary data to enable campaign/audience analysis. An example of this is Google's Ads Data Hub (ADH).

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Whilst not set up solely as a solution to 3rd party cookies, Google has recently launched GA4 which adds a layer of AI to fill in any gaps in measurement via modelling.

Fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting is a methodology that looks at a device or browser setup to determine an individual user e.g. operating systems, language setting, IP address etc. Those against this argue that it is a workaround rather than a solution to creating a more privacy centric Internet.

Key Point:

Regardless of which solutions dominate in the coming years, digital marketers need to start changing their mindset to understand that we are moving from a precision to a predictive era. Measurement and targeting will be moving to become based more on 'predictive models' and less about absolutes. It also likely that digital marketers will need to use several solutions depending on the channel/platform and requirement.