Google again has shocked the industry with the announcement that they will not be removing third-party cookies from Chrome browsers, after over four years of stating they would. The advertising industry has been at a standstill while it awaited a solution from Google. With promises of a new, privacy-first solution, many expected a robust solution from Google. However, all signs pointed to a company struggling to find answers.
The reality is that this news is a blessing and a curse for the advertising industry. By not removing them, the functionality of digital advertising can continue, albeit leveraging a deeply flawed piece of technology. Cookies were never meant for what advertisers rely on them for. But they do add value from an audience targeting and tracking perspective. Without this, Google was going to struggle to provide a viable digital solution for advertisers, opening them up to the possibility of losing significant market share from all non-search channels.
It has been a rocky road in the last four and a half years since Google first announced its removal of cookies. There have been several iterations tested behind the scenes to solve the targeting and measurement challenges with technology that was able to replicate cookies, before more were presented publicly. At every turn, highly publicized failures to deliver a viable solution, and the EU consistently stated that the solutions did not take enough steps to ensure consumer privacy.
Yet, hope remained because Google consistently showcased its trust in its internal processes to find a solution. The truth is that there was little reason to challenge that view given the full engineering might of one of the largest technology companies in the world. Google, though, could not crack the cookieless code. Testing on the likes of Turtledove, FLoC, and Topics all struggled to deliver the results needed.
While Google struggled to find a viable solution, numerous other companies emerged to challenge the dominance of Google with their own cookieless solutions. The Trade Desk, Google’s biggest rival in the programmatic/DSP space, released Unified ID, then Unified ID 2.0, a solution that gives the power back to consumers to opt into the kind of tracking they are comfortable with without relying on cookies. Yahoo created a similar proposition.
Where audience targeting became harder to establish without cookies, many turned to contextual targeting. More focus was placed on richer evaluation of the content and context of pages across the internet, with some taking a step further towards sentiment analysis to understand how content may make people feel.
All of this sought to either replicate cookies in a new way, or find viable solutions that offered scale while ensuring privacy. The importance of Google’s initial move to remove cookies cannot be understated. While Safari and Firefox had already removed third-party cookies from browsers, the biggest impact came with Google’s announcement. It was so impactful, it essentially led to an entire tech category dying.
Data Management Platforms (or DMPs) were a huge business a few years ago. Demanding high investment costs, they promised a way to identify a user across numerous touchpoints, channels, and platforms. It allowed advertisers to reach consumers with one-to-one marketing messaging.
Companies like Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, Neustar, and Lotame built huge positions in the market. All made huge profits off the technology, but almost all have removed their DMP products, or shut their businesses since Google’s announcement. This led to the evolution of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and privacy sandboxes; cookieless solutions as new ways to reach consumers. CDPs are not as robust as DMPs but are more privacy-centric.
These new solutions show plenty of promise, but none have yet to fully deliver an end-to-end solution that justifies the cost and time required to set these up. With this announcement, Google has ensured the digital space remains the same for the foreseeable future. But this does not mean that media agencies continue to do the same thing they have previously done.
So much time and effort has been dedicated to upskilling everyone on the implications on the removal of cookies, as well as exploring and testing alternative solutions. This needs to continue being a focus. Yes, the sense of urgency may have dissipated, but it remains incredibly important to find alternative solutions. Cookies are flawed, with an overreliance on them to deliver extraordinary capabilities that they were not created for.
Maybe the alternative solutions are not yet perfect, but they are trying. The reality is that advertisers need to leverage multiple targeting and measurement solutions. There is so much fragmentation, it can be easy to fall back to a reliable yet outdated solution. But Google’s announcement does not change the fact that other companies, such as Apple, are still looking to kill off cookies. Meanwhile, new technologies like Connected TV do not have cookies available, and have established amazing targeting capabilities despite this.
Google has bought advertisers, and themselves, time, but everyone needs to continue to push for the removal of cookies. It is crucial to be no longer reliant on this technology. AI will likely replace much of the targeting through anonymised buying, but at the cost of insight and understanding of who customers are and what they really need. There is a space for AI to help automate processes, but we also need to be able to have our own methods for reaching people with something they might see value in. We need to be able to do both. To have flexibility of reaching the right people with the right message, with future-proofed technology. Cookies are not that.