For months and months, I’ve been excited about the progress towards cookieless solutions popping up in the ad-tech industry. But Google left us no choice. This year, after confirming and claiming that third-party cookies were indeed going to go away by September 2024, and deprecating 1% of these in browsers globally by January 2024, Google announced that they will not deprecate third-party cookies after all. Instead, they will allow users to opt out of third-party tracking.
It wasn’t even news this time. It has turned from something apocalyptic, a gold rush for some, to comical. And frankly, a bit boring.
Not that consumer privacy is boring. There is rampant ad fraud in the ad tech industry and billions are lost by both advertisers and publishers every year. (I wrote about this a while back: Ad Supply Chain - Aspen Tech Policy Hub). According to Lyle Currier, North America Consumer Media Lead of Lenovo, a fellow speaker at the MediaPost Data & Programmatic Summit, 35% of programmatic sites are “junk sites.” And not to mention the rise in hacks that target consumer data, with the most recent one impacting, well, all of us, in which 2.9 billion personal records were hacked.
The shift in consumer perception of the importance of data privacy prompted by Apple has certainly steered the industry in the right direction. And user privacy remains important, whether Google deprecates third-party cookies or not.
What should brands and advertisers do in this nebulous situation? My advice:
1. Invest in first-party data: The regulations and Google’s (lack of) decisioning does not impact first-party data rights and they will not in the future. This should be the priority for all brands. Beef up your first-party data gathering and privacy-safe activation strategies. First-party data is your property right.
2. Transparency: It’s only a right if the consumer is informed. Invest in consent tools and notices and certainly opt out the user if they ask to be opted out of behavioral advertising.
3. Be compliant and content will win: Consumers like free, fast information. If a web page does not load within a millisecond, they move on to the next page or video or article. Even if Google introduces the opt-outs for cookie-based advertising, the majority of users will stay put. If you introduce opt-out, the majority of users will consent. People are more interested in accessing free content and information than deciding what information they want to allow or not. Be compliant. You will still have a lot of data to work with.
4. Invest in privacy-friendly technologies: There are many, many forms of privacy-safe advertising out there now. And many, many bad actors in the ecosystem as well. Do not compromise on privacy-safe usage of your customer’s data: in the long run they will lose brand trust if a bad actor gets their data, and it can be tracked back to you. Invest in ID resolution tech, in clean rooms, and only work with companies and partners who take user privacy seriously.
5. Contextual targeting rises in value : Google’s post-cookie solutions such as “Topics API” and “Audience API” are also all based around contextual targeting. This is not new. This is how advertising has always worked, and this will remain relevant. Contextually align your media buys and placements with your audience’s interests and you might not have to worry about third-party cookies to begin with.
At RPA, we test across all these strategies on an ongoing basis and have seen incredible results: We saw first-party activations drive 60-90% of traffic for an auto campaign and contextual segments drive 100% higher CTRs than regular audience targeting. And while the impetus to do these tests had a lot to do with the urgency of third-party cookie deprecation, these results are so great that we don’t plan on stopping. Continued investment in these strategies is of value either way.
One more note: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep testing and learning with other DSPs, technologies, new AI tools and other tactics. As we saw with Oracle, we don’t know when a company might decide to pivot out of ad-tech entirely. Brands and advertisers cannot, since all consumers are now online and it continues to be the best way to engage with them and drive directly to brands’ websites.
