Written by Niraj Nagpal on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership).
While comical it may be to quote a famous rapper/singer, I couldn’t help but think of a relatable way to speak to marketers and their agencies that are living in a form of collective denial.
Starting Jan 4, 2024, nearly 30 million Chrome browsers will block third party cookies, with the rest of the 99% of users to be following this in Q4/Q1 2025.
This says nothing of the fact that other major browsers including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox made this very change years ago effectively making 30% of the global internet population untraceable for attribution, reporting, and frequency capping purposes.
And yet, are marketers really taking this seriously or waiting for a single magic cookie replacement to come along?
My opinion is that marketers that are seriously preparing with their agencies help will end up reaping the rewards of better targeting, improved customer experience and reducing media wastage.
So, knowing what there is to gain, let’s look at a few steps and realities that marketers need to take and consider.
Your 1st party data when assigned to a use case has value. Data for data sake without alignment across teams in your organization to solve for a specific challenge has no value.
Investing in the right type of CDP/data lake infrastructure and working backwards on why you are collecting data, what is its purpose, and what you will do with it will help keep you focused and privacy compliant.
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- Once your 1st party data is in a hygienic state, begin to work with other parties to augment your customer profiles in a privacy centric approach such as data clean rooms.
- Privacy enhanced technologies come in many flavors that preserve trust between parties without data being exposed and, in some providers, not moved at all.
- Again, begin with the use case and select your match partners and methodology accordingly. Hit singles and not try for home runs.
- Experiment with alternative ID’s now. For example, UID 2.0, LiveRamp Ramp ID, ID5, etc. 15+ different alternative ID’s exist, many which are aiming to be interoperable with each other.
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- In parallel, invest the time and resources to begin testing the Privacy Sandbox API’s now from Google which will not be a 1:1 replacement for cookies and their functionality, but still pivotal moving forward.
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- Work with publishers and encourage them to adapt IAB’s seller defined audience as a trusted signal for media activation in addition to contextual targeting solutions.
- With buyer support, this technology will only gain support. Otherwise, publishers will continue to lose out in the programmatic value exchange which benefits no one, including your consumers in the long run.
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- Understand the importance of retail media networks. E.g. Amazon, Tesco, Carousell, Grab, Coles, etc. This new category of inventory and data supply will be a $100B industry in the years to come.
- The persistent signal of transactional data/ride sharing will augment the loss of cookie and identity signals. By leaning in today, marketers have the opportunity to perfect their marketing budget mix, ask for unique data sets, and tie back media dollars to sales.
It’s easy and understandable for marketers and agencies to live in denial that one solution or approach will suddenly manifest.
However, now is the only chance marketers have to control their destiny and mitigate the pain of complete signal loss.
The harsh reality is that measurement and targeting will be broken, that there will be no one single third party cookie replacement (interoperability is key).
While nothing will be the same, the future has never looked brighter. “Take care.”
Most asked questions
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