By Kshitij Depda Published on : Aug 19, 2022
The cookie-free future has been delayed; if you have no idea what this means, here is a quick translation. Google originally planned to phase out third-party cookies at the beginning of 2022, heralding the 'cookie-free future,' but Google has pushed that date back nearly two years - to the end of 2023.
This surprise shook the adtech and martech businesses, which had spent the previous two years planning for a cookie-less future. So, now that the deadline has been pushed back, the issue is, "What do you do?"
In this article, we'll unravel what these extra two years imply for you as a marketer to assist you in making the most of this new timeline.
The Cookie-Free Future: Why Should We Care?
As a marketer, you no doubt have hundreds of competing priorities – each of them urgent and presumably with an immediate impact on revenue. So you'd be forgiven for wondering why you should worry about something in over two years– but you should revisit your thought, and here's why.
The removal of third-party cookies flips the digital advertising world on its head. Their deprecation implies that serving digital advertising, retargeting, and cross-domain tracking is virtually entirely at a halt.
If your stir is dependent on any of these three factors, consider what your results and revenue would look like if they vanished overnight - because that's what's going to happen.
2023: A Cookie-Free Era?
Before you contemplate kicking the can down the road and deferring your cookieless world preparations until far later, remember this: even Google required a deadline extension. They set a deadline for themselves.
If Google, with its near-infinite resources, realized that preparing for the cookieless future would take not just another six months but two years, then warning bells should ring for the rest of us with less modest origins. This implies that the delay in the cookieless future shouldn't be interpreted as an excuse to postpone, but instead as a reminder that every minute counts in ensuring you're ready.
Preparing for a cookie-free world
Our top pieces of advice are on our experience assisting marketers worldwide.
Build your First-Party Data Asset
Regarding the cookie-free future, third-party data must be substituted with first-party data. When one type of data goes, the best thing to do is something that may seem obvious: acquire it from somewhere else. That is the information you obtain directly from your existing clients or prospects.
Next-generation solutions can assist you in maintaining data privacy and compliance. The next-generation customer Data Platform enables you to establish more precise segmentation and identify consumers across numerous devices and identifiers. The platform collects data from several sources, unifies it, and then makes it available.
Take Stock of Consent
As you negotiate the cookie-less future and begin constructing your first-party data asset, remember why third-party cookies were removed in the first place: they harmed customer confidence.
Third-party cookies gave the feeling of being 'following' around the internet, blurring the limits of customer control over their data. All of this built up a breakdown in trust among customers, marketers, and publishers, which is why cookies are being phased out. Whatever technique you adopt in a cookie-free future, you must avoid making the same error twice.
This is related to our earlier remark about aggregating first-party data. After all, consent for a single user may be obtained in various ways. To stay on top of things, you must combine these several sources. However, like our initial point regarding harmonizing first-party data, this is easier said than done.
CMPs (Consent Management Platforms) are an excellent investment. As the spectrum ends, the issue is deciding how consent shows when acting on such data. Examine your data management rules for consent mastery and permission orchestration run; a solid CDP should incorporate this.
Explore the Cookie-Free World of Addressability
First-party data is an essential component of the cookie-free future, but it is not the only one. In the absence of third-party cookies, a slew of new targeting strategies are emerging to fill the space – and you now have two years to figure out which ones will work for you.
The complete list – and their respective pros and cons – is an encyclopedia unto itself, but here's a quick primer of the kind of things to look out for:
Contextual-based targeting- This is the technique of placing advertisements on websites that are appropriate to the interests or attributes of your target audience.
Cohort-based- This is what we mean; it targets people with similar browsing behaviors, safeguarding their privacy while giving advertising precision.
Probabilistic- We may use it for 'fingerprinting,' leveraging a user's information to create a targetable profile.
Authenticated user accounts- If you've heard of "Universal Identifiers," this is the same thing - they are "premium" viewers because they quickly validate themselves on a publisher's website.
As you can see, the landscape has become significantly more complicated. Understanding it is one thing. Testing is a different story; now is the time to ensure you have the means and finances to put them through their paces and create a new toolset that will lead your campaigns toward a cookie-free future.
Final Thoughts
The countdown has begun - and, lest we forget, third-party cookies have already vanished from Safari and Firefox, so theoretically, the cookie-less future has arrived!
As a marketer, this means there is no time to spend preparing for the new world of digital marketing. This entails not only constructing a robust, consented first-party data asset but also assembling an entirely new suite of addressability options when before there was just one (third-party cookies).
By Kshitij Depda
Published on 19th, Aug, 2022
The cookie-free future has been delayed; if you have no idea what this means, here is a quick translation. Google originally planned to phase out third-party cookies at the beginning of 2022, heralding the 'cookie-free future,' but Google has pushed that date back nearly two years - to the end of 2023.
This surprise shook the adtech and martech businesses, which had spent the previous two years planning for a cookie-less future. So, now that the deadline has been pushed back, the issue is, "What do you do?"
In this article, we'll unravel what these extra two years imply for you as a marketer to assist you in making the most of this new timeline.
The Cookie-Free Future: Why Should We Care?
As a marketer, you no doubt have hundreds of competing priorities – each of them urgent and presumably with an immediate impact on revenue. So you'd be forgiven for wondering why you should worry about something in over two years– but you should revisit your thought, and here's why.
The removal of third-party cookies flips the digital advertising world on its head. Their deprecation implies that serving digital advertising, retargeting, and cross-domain tracking is virtually entirely at a halt.
If your stir is dependent on any of these three factors, consider what your results and revenue would look like if they vanished overnight - because that's what's going to happen.
2023: A Cookie-Free Era?
Before you contemplate kicking the can down the road and deferring your cookieless world preparations until far later, remember this: even Google required a deadline extension. They set a deadline for themselves.
If Google, with its near-infinite resources, realized that preparing for the cookieless future would take not just another six months but two years, then warning bells should ring for the rest of us with less modest origins. This implies that the delay in the cookieless future shouldn't be interpreted as an excuse to postpone, but instead as a reminder that every minute counts in ensuring you're ready.
Preparing for a cookie-free world
Our top pieces of advice are on our experience assisting marketers worldwide.
Build your First-Party Data Asset
Regarding the cookie-free future, third-party data must be substituted with first-party data. When one type of data goes, the best thing to do is something that may seem obvious: acquire it from somewhere else. That is the information you obtain directly from your existing clients or prospects.
Next-generation solutions can assist you in maintaining data privacy and compliance. The next-generation customer Data Platform enables you to establish more precise segmentation and identify consumers across numerous devices and identifiers. The platform collects data from several sources, unifies it, and then makes it available.
Take Stock of Consent
As you negotiate the cookie-less future and begin constructing your first-party data asset, remember why third-party cookies were removed in the first place: they harmed customer confidence.
Third-party cookies gave the feeling of being 'following' around the internet, blurring the limits of customer control over their data. All of this built up a breakdown in trust among customers, marketers, and publishers, which is why cookies are being phased out. Whatever technique you adopt in a cookie-free future, you must avoid making the same error twice.
This is related to our earlier remark about aggregating first-party data. After all, consent for a single user may be obtained in various ways. To stay on top of things, you must combine these several sources. However, like our initial point regarding harmonizing first-party data, this is easier said than done.
CMPs (Consent Management Platforms) are an excellent investment. As the spectrum ends, the issue is deciding how consent shows when acting on such data. Examine your data management rules for consent mastery and permission orchestration run; a solid CDP should incorporate this.
Explore the Cookie-Free World of Addressability
First-party data is an essential component of the cookie-free future, but it is not the only one. In the absence of third-party cookies, a slew of new targeting strategies are emerging to fill the space – and you now have two years to figure out which ones will work for you.
The complete list – and their respective pros and cons – is an encyclopedia unto itself, but here's a quick primer of the kind of things to look out for:
Contextual-based targeting- This is the technique of placing advertisements on websites that are appropriate to the interests or attributes of your target audience.
Cohort-based- This is what we mean; it targets people with similar browsing behaviors, safeguarding their privacy while giving advertising precision.
Probabilistic- We may use it for 'fingerprinting,' leveraging a user's information to create a targetable profile.
Authenticated user accounts- If you've heard of "Universal Identifiers," this is the same thing - they are "premium" viewers because they quickly validate themselves on a publisher's website.
As you can see, the landscape has become significantly more complicated. Understanding it is one thing. Testing is a different story; now is the time to ensure you have the means and finances to put them through their paces and create a new toolset that will lead your campaigns toward a cookie-free future.
Final Thoughts
The countdown has begun - and, lest we forget, third-party cookies have already vanished from Safari and Firefox, so theoretically, the cookie-less future has arrived!
As a marketer, this means there is no time to spend preparing for the new world of digital marketing. This entails not only constructing a robust, consented first-party data asset but also assembling an entirely new suite of addressability options when before there was just one (third-party cookies).
