Brands and publishers press on toward cookieless future

After years of “will they, won’t they,” Google announced last week that it isn’t planning on sunsetting third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser after all. Brands and publishers say the industry is moving on from cookies anyway. 

“Nothing changes. Marketers still have an urgent need for more reliable reach and attribution. Third-party cookies were never a good solution for consumers or brands,” Christine Foster, VP of product strategy and media operations at Kroger Precision Marketing, tells The Current. “First-party data remains the most trusted and effective means to reach relevant audiences.”

The sentiment echoes a July Adobe survey, which showed only 49% of marketers reported relying on data from cookies, compared to 75% in 2022. More than half of respondents said that if cookies went away, the change would have little to no impact on their advertising strategies, which Adobe attributed to the industry forgoing the cookie tracking system in general. 

Google had initially announced the Chrome web browser phaseout of third-party cookies in 2019, with plans to be done by August 2022. The deprecation date was subsequently pushed back several times, despite a small number of users taking part in cookieless tests, until Google’s latest the announcement that it won’t be removing them at all. Since 2019, Google has faced an antitrust lawsuit, complaints about its Privacy Sandbox alternative, and ongoing concerns from the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, which investigated Privacy Sandbox.

The tech giant didn’t provide a reason for extending the life of cookies in its announcement, instead focusing on giving users the choice to opt in or out of cookies, as Google VP of Privacy Sandbox Anthony Chavez explains in a blog post.

Brands aren’t slowing down

Many brands have already expended a lot of time and resources developing alternative strategies to reduce their dependence on cookies. Industry experts believe the tracking approach will eventually dissolve due to the growth of better alternate solutions and consumers’ reluctance to allow cookie tracking.

According to a May 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 67% of U.S. adults turned off cookies to protect their privacy, placing the act only second to adjusting social media privacy settings.

“People are opting out. Our audience is opting out. So our audience is telling us that that is not a preferred way,” says Steve Weeks, director of performance marketing at Adobe. “We feel we need to find alternative ways to reach our audience in a way that they want to be reached. In a way that is appropriate for them.”

Weeks says that Adobe, known for products like Photoshop and After Effects, relies heavily on cookies for its digital activations, especially for display media, and is still welcoming the reversal in cookie deprecation because it dissolves some of the pressure in finding immediate solutions to retargeting anonymous audiences.

“A world with cookies will go away at some point, and so, if we can find alternatives that are privacy-safe and give us equal or better performance, we want to be able to look for that; we want to be able to enable that; and we want to be able to do that on our terms, quite honestly,” says Weeks.

Cookies also often fail to capture the entire consumer journey across devices, given that platforms like connected TV and audio never relied on cookies to begin with.

“The trend is clear; cookie usage is declining, and relying on them for insights means basing strategies on flawed data, leading to suboptimal performance and misallocation of budgets,” writes Andy Stevens, chief data officer at Clear Channel International, in a LinkedIn post.

Retail media is another area that doesn’t depend on third-party cookies. Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and general manager at CVS Media Exchange, says Google’s reversal “reaffirms” the value of first-party data over third-party cookies. He says the company remains “strong believers in the incredible value and personalization that first-party data can bring to brands, especially when it comes to shopper behaviors.”

In fact, Foster says that advertisers using Kroger’s first-party retail signals need just 51% of the impressions to have the same business impact as third-party cookies.

“The momentum behind first-party data is sustained by proof of performance more than technology or time investments,” she says. “Brands won’t singularly rely on third-party cookies moving forward because they prefer the more reliable reach and metrics enabled by solutions like retail signals.”

Stevens also points out how regulation in the consumer-privacy space will not slow down. “While cookies are still permitted for now, they feel increasingly at odds with regulations designed to give consumers more control over their data,” Stevens writes.

The publisher perspective

Much like brands, publishers are in the same boat but seemingly with more on the line, as they continue to face threats to their bottom lines — from the rise of AI to keyword blocklists.

The Weather Channel’s digital properties are taking a “business as usual” approach, says Dave Olesnevich, The Weather Company’s head of data and advertising products.

“We’re going to continue to build for the future state of advertising instead of hanging onto the past,” he says, pointing toward The Weather Channel’s testing of alternative identifiers like ID5 and UID2 as well as clean rooms and Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

Olesnevich believes most of the best systems are reliant on users having a registered email to give access to first-party data. He thinks successful publishers will continue to develop that direct relationship. 

“We’re [going to] test probabilistic and deterministic identifiers, so that’ll be part of our mix going forward,” Olesnevich says. “In order for that to work on the deterministic side, we are leaning into the new registered web.” 

That’s exactly what Axios is betting on — the publisher is focusing on building its direct relationship with its audience to be immune to the fluctuating tides in ad tech. 

“It’s no surprise that this space keeps shifting,” says Axios COO Allison Murphy. “For us, there’s little impact: Axios is built on direct relationships with our audience, from email inboxes to live events. Combined with our core of authentic subject-matter expertise, our business is very resilient as ad tech, and decisions around it, evolve.”

Of course, in order to maintain that direct relationship, publishers will need to provide utility for users who opt in to sharing their data, Olesnevich added. The Weather Company has a weather targeting tool that helps people plan their lives, such as finding the best time to participate in outdoor sporting activities. It can also use that user data to help brands target specific zip codes with in-context messaging. 

E.l.f. Cosmetics, for instance, used weather data to create a holiday campaign to show people makeup looks that could survive any winter-weather condition. This move resulted in 9.2% brand awareness for women aged 25 through 34, and a 17.3% lift in purchase intent through its sunny-day creative assets.

Murphy believes more companies will move away from middle- to bottom-funnel marketing as strategies shift further from relying on cookies. “The usefulness of cookies has always been overstated, right?” she says. “Everyone bought in on that illusion because it was the best solution that existed. I think people recognize now for sure the limitations of that technology.”