Why Marketers Shouldn't Dismay As Cookies Aren't Here to Stay

When Google announced that Chrome will no longer be deprecating cookies for all users, it may have been met with indifference in some marketing camps. Does this mean that all the effort and investment the industry has made in preparing for a cookieless world has been in vain? The answer put simply is no.

The new announcement from Chrome introduces ‘elevated informed user choice’, predicted to launch in 2025 along similar timelines to their original framework. What this means is that it will be users, rather than Chrome, that will put the final nail in the coffin for third-party cookies. 

How, you may ask? Well, it is anticipated that 70-80 per cent of Chrome users will choose not to have third-party cookies enabled on their browser, mirroring opt-out rates seen in Apple’s app transparency feature. This means the marketer of the future will need a variety of alternative data signals to get a similar picture of marketing success. With this in mind, there is still a clear need to move away from cookie-based technologies.

Marketers who have not yet engaged with the cookie news cycle should look to do so sooner rather than later. By 2025, 80-90 per cent of all web traffic will have no third party cookies. Those who have done nothing yet are already being left behind; this year already 56 per cent of global web traffic lacks scaled third party cookies for advertising. Key contributors to this include non-Chrome browser cookie deprecation, use of ad-blocking technologies and user opt-out of third party cookies (depending on which market you’re in).

The marketing capabilities impacted by this change are broad and widespread. A new approach is now required to be able to reach your key consumers, personalise messaging and measure the impact of marketing budgets. To achieve this, technologies will evolve from using a single signal approach powered by third-party cookies to a multi-data point approach using a combination of first-party data, non-personally identifiable information (non-PII) data and aggregated data.

Traditionally, it’s been up to ad tech followed by publishers to react to changes in the technology ecosystem, with advertisers being the end consumers of the developed solutions. However, with significant budgets at risk, marketers should act by speaking directly to ad tech companies rather than trusting solutions being brought to market that are increasingly a closed box.

Testing budgets can be used as an incentive to engage with ad tech to increase transparency on new solutions being built. The goal of this budget should be to accelerate the release of new capabilities and understand the differences in how old versus new solutions support a brand in reaching its audiences and achieving its KPIs.

Marketers will need to move to a multi-signal approach.

As the digital space becomes even more fragmented and the use of single identifiers diminishes, integrating multiple signals and technologies, including those offered by the Privacy Sandbox, will be crucial for achieving advertising objectives.

What this means in practice is marketers should be looking to invest with media and technology partners that offer a diverse range of buying and measurement signals. Critical capabilities to ask an ad tech or agency partner include:

• What mechanisms do they have available to activate first party and what implications does that have for media buying (e.g., data clean rooms and programmatic guaranteed or private marketplace deals)?

• What targeting capabilities and technology integrations do they have available to create audiences using alternative signals such as attention, enhanced context, geospatial data and publisher cohorts? How similar/different are these audiences in comparison to audiences built using cookies?

• What future-proofed signals will they use to support measurement/attribution and how do the benchmarks from these signals compare to current cookie-based reporting?

Each signal used by an ad tech partner will need to be tested through the lens of incrementality to find the optimal mix for each brand’s unique positioning and context. Where infrastructure development cost is required brand-side, such as with clean rooms, before investing too heavily, you should look to run small-scale pilots to prove value and effectiveness.

Now is the perfect time to begin this journey if you haven’t already because we still have enough significant third party cookie scale for benchmark comparison.

Be cautious of knee-jerk budget reactions…

As signal loss happens, our ability to directly attribute media to value outcomes reduces and “costs per” metrics may appear to increase in price. However, just because something can’t be attributed doesn’t mean the value of a media platform or inventory has diminished without a tangible change to the media offerings provided by publishers. To solve for this, we need to find alternative measurement approaches and metrics that fairly and reliably credit media sources.

We have already seen a trend of unfair budget weighting in the under investment of marketing spend across Safari, Edge, Mozilla, and iOS environments due to platform algorithms optimising towards where they can see data. This overweighting towards Chrome means that marketers could be missing out on reaching up to 50 per cent of their consumers.

Another consideration is ensuring continued ethical investment in a variety of publications. If budgets continue their current trajectory trends towards a walled garden and Connected TV approach, there’s a risk that valuable, diverse publications that reach and serve under-represented communities will be lost as their future investment disappears.

Measurement needs to become more purposeful…

Marketers now have a lot of data at their disposal, but it is only valuable if it can be used for the prediction and understanding of value, such as market share growth, customer value, profitability, and brand salience. As an industry, we’ve been guilty of over-focus on platform available metrics which don’t always show what is impactful in driving meaningful brand outcomes. Cookie-loss means a reduction in the reliability of platform metrics and increased levels of data aggregation as IDs are removed. This provides an opportunity for marketers to upgrade their current strategy and reprioritise to more rounded metrics, such as customer lifetime value and brand health.

Brands can get ahead by investing in data infrastructure, advanced analytics and AI to bring together and reveal new insights across media, first party and business datasets. For non-direct-to-consumer brands, data partnerships with retailers and research companies will become increasingly important to fill the gap in visibility.

Now’s the time to act…

While Chrome’s decision to move to a user-choice model for cookie decline hasn’t changed the trajectory of cookie loss, it should act as a wake-up call to marketers to start testing new technologies sooner rather than later, while comparable benchmarks are available.

Belle Cartwright, is the global tech acceleration lead at EssenceMediacom