Long live the cookie: But the direction of travel is still data

Phew, the cookie has been saved! Google has announced that they are going to abandon its decision to block third-party cookies and there was a collective sigh of relief.

We can go back to focusing on the important stuff like, tracking people’s behaviour without their consent, so we can work out who best to target our washing powder or whiskey ads at.

It’s not a wholly unexpected development. Let’s remember, Google first talked about doing this nearly four years ago and as recently as a couple of months ago pushed the timeline back due to the potential negative impact on businesses that rely on cookie-based technology to power their business critical Q4 campaigns.

It’s also understandable that Google wouldn’t necessarily be in a rush to remove third-party cookies given that there aren’t a bunch of brilliant alternative technologies for powering consistent personalisation and tracking of advertising across multiple websites. And any such solution likely would erode the efficacy of that advertising as it would rely on slightly lower precision in favour of privacy – a challenge that doesn’t necessarily impact Google’s rivals who operate predominantly in a walled garden where the opportunities are quite difficult.

Either way, probably a good thing for agencies and advertisers that we don’t have to worry about all those complicated issues that this was going to throw up. Except it’s not, as despite this news, the third-party cookie has been deprecating for years now and will continue to deprecate, it just won’t disappear completely.

There’s a slight air to the discussion on third-party cookies of that Simpsons episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian and takes umbrage with Homer’s barbeque.

• GDPR fundamentally changes the conversation around user privacy – it’s still good, it’s still good.
• The rise of mobile and the limitations of cookies when users change apps – it’s still good, it’s still good.
• Increasing amounts of digital lives being in what are now closed walled gardens – it’s still good, it’s still good.

The reality is that while this announcement from Google saves some cookies and by extension some of the technologies that rely on cookies to track people, model their behaviour and target them with advertising, the direction of travel is clear – privacy and consumer empowerment around data are winning out.

It’s reflected in Google’s announcement; while the blanket removal of cookies has been abandoned, the replacement approach of an ‘informed choice’ about how consumers share their browsing data likely leads to a significant number of users opting out anyway (just look at what happened when Apple introduced a similar choice on apps tracking you – around 66% of users rejected tracking in 2023).

While we’re not necessarily on the path to a zero-cookie world, it cannot be argued that relying on cookies to make targeting decisions, profile audiences or measure advertising effectiveness is a sustainable solution.

So what do we do now? Well simplistically, a lot of the guidance about how to navigate a zero-cookie world pretty much applies to our new some-cookie world.

There are broadly three areas that we should be thinking about:

1. Not being single minded about identity signals: There’s a lot of data out there. Cookies are a subset of one particular type of data – identity data (data specific to an individual). This is not the only signal that can be effective to identify an audience, personalise a message or measure behaviour. Signals such as geography or context are increasingly powerful and versatile data sets to drive greater effectiveness.
2. Continue to embrace privacy centric solutions: The people who are opted in to be tracked through cookies are likely to be the minority in the future. Solutions such as the Google Privacy Sandbox API remain an important part of future proofing our campaigns, they just take the role of helping us maintain scale rather than as a complete replacement for what we do today. Equally from a measurement point of view, an increasing focus on predictive models such as MMMs or incrementality experiments remains critical.
3. Beware of the costs of technology work around: Our industry’s focus on making sure we’re using data has brought in a new world of technology vendors to link data together and allow data to be activated in different platforms. As we navigate a reduced-cookie world, more of these solutions are becoming prominent to get round the evolving challenges – each adding some cost.

Thinkbox’s recent Profit Ability study highlighted a slightly alarming trend – the most effective channels driving overall ROI were broad, offline channels (TV, print, audio) with the more data-driven channels lagging behind. This is likely, partly, a function of the additional technology cost being layered on to the media buy not generating a big enough ROI boost to justify it. Given some solutions will be less appropriate going forward, it’s a good opportunity to review which technology solutions are genuinely value additive and which aren’t to maximise effectiveness

The cookie has had a stay of execution thanks to Google’s recent announcement, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals that the universality of the cookie is long gone. Brands that embrace and adapt to our new normal will thrive, while those that cling on to the cookie safety net will increasingly find themselves in a fractured, scale-limited, low-effectiveness world.

Article originally published in Performance Marketing World.