Google reversed its cookie deprecation plans. Now what?

In an industry that’s well versed in managing bombshell announcements, marketers hardly blinked after Google said that it wouldn’t get rid of third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser after all.

With scant details on Google’s new proposal and nearly five years of industry preparation underway, advertisers are left to ask:What happens next? A few factors will determine that, namely the responses of regulators in the U.S. and abroad; how Google would deploy “user choice” in the browser; the progress of alternative identifiers; and what channels are gaining more share (including cookieless ones like connected TV (CTV) and audio).

While multiple people The Current spoke with said they are eager to learn the particulars of how Google will implement its latest plan, they are not undoing the infrastructure they’ve developed since 2020, when Google first announced its plan to deprecate cookies.

“We’re going to continue to build for the future state of advertising instead of hanging onto the past,” Dave Olesnevich, head of data and advertising products at The Weather Company, tells The Current.

The privacy and regulation front

After Google dropped that it was reversing course in July, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the U.K.’s data protection regulator, released a statement saying that while it was “disappointed that Google has changed its plans,” it would “continue to encourage the digital advertising industry to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies — and not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking.”

It’s hard to overstate the industry power of Google Chrome, which controls around 60% of browser traffic, according to Statista. The scale of its user base has implications when it comes down to potential regulation, according to Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at ad-industry watchdog Check My Ads Institute.

“The industry’s collective future is tethered to the whims and schemes of a monopolist,” Garcia wrote in an op-ed published on Campaign Asia. “Equally clear: This whole debacle has very little to do with privacy. For those in the ad world tracking real privacy-related developments, it was always evident that this was a blend of end-running regulators and commercial opportunism. This was about maintaining control and preemptively distorting the concept of privacy to suit Big Tech interests.”

What’s more, Google’s latest plan comes months before the tech giant is involved in its second antitrust trial, with September’s trial focusing on allegations that it holds a monopoly over the digital advertising industry. Rob Norman, former CEO of GroupM North America, wonders whether that scrutiny informed Google’s ultimate decision to support consumer choice in its Chrome web browser rather than full-scale cookie deprecation.

“In doing that, they probably stave off the attentions of the regulator a little bit,” Norman tells The Current. “We’ll see sort of a slow and lumbering process toward the same inevitable outcome that we would have had had they deprecated cookies completely.”

With so much at stake, regulators don’t have an easy decision on their hands. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is overseeing Google’s changes to cookies, and the ICO, said they would work together to consider Google’s new plan. The CMA is postponing its quarterly report, originally due out in July, to at least August. Making wholesale changes to cookies, which have been a cornerstone to advertisers for decades, is proving to be a monumental task.

“This shift reflects an industrywide struggle to identify privacy-protective and functional ad tech options that don’t run afoul of a growing digital rulebook governing not only privacy, but also competition, AI, online safety and more,” Caitlin Fennessy, VP and chief knowledge officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, tells The Current. “Recent enforcement actions have pushed the industry toward consent and user choice, while questioning the validity and practicality of that choice.”

Marketers move their chips around

The fastest-growing channels in digital media — like CTV, audio, retail media and mobile apps — are cookieless environments already, making the cookie overall less important to marketers. According to Kim Gilberti, chief product officer at Experian, marketers who continue to develop new approaches to audience targeting will likely be in the best position for future-proofing their media strategies.

“A significant portion of web traffic does not support cookies today —and that number will grow as Google rolls out [its] new solution,” Gilberti tells The Current. “This means that the industry shouldn't slow down investments in cookieless solutions, including alternative IDs, first-party data and data-driven contextual targeting.”

As John Donahue, partner at programmatic consultancy Up and to the Right, previously stated, the cookie’s upheaval forces many to “evolve or die.”

A sizable chunk of that evolution comes from authentication on channels like CTV, and the audience data that can be reaped from it. In the upgraded internet era, first-party data is a critical part of the future of monetization and advertising.

“As the cookie turns, we see yet again everything has changed and yet nothing has changed,” Amol Waishampayan, CTO at fullthrottle.ai, tells The Current. “Whether you’re an advertiser, agency or publisher, the only course of action is to control your own revenue destiny through the pursuit of addressable first-party data — as its acceleration in the market continues unabated.”