If you are in the Digital Advertising industry you are probably aware that this past July Google announced the deadline for the deprecation of third-party cookies has been postponed to the second half of 2024.

If you haven’t been able to follow this or would like to learn more…say no more, here is a quick summary of what has happened:

• Let’s start with the basics: What are Cookies? They are small bits of code that are stored on users’ devices as they browse the internet and that have been historically used by advertisers and publishers to target relevant ads to potential customers.
• Firefox and Safari have already phased out third-party cookies, Google has yet to do so even though making multiple announcements.
• When Google first announced in 2020 that they would be eliminating cookies, itshaked the advertising industry as Chrome owns over 65% of the browser market share worldwide.
• Google’s original timeline was to deprecate Third-Party Cookies in Chrome by mid 2022
• Google and other companies started to work on solutions to address targeting and measurement a cookieless world. Most notoriously were proposals such as Google’s FLoC – a solution to show ads to users based on their web-browsing history, rather than any specific actions like clicks and purchases, and doing it on a group level, instead of an individual level – and TTD’s Unified ID 2.O – an open-source framework that publishers, advertisers, and digital advertising platforms can use to establish identity without third-party cookies.
• During June 2021 Google extended its deadline for the first time until the end of 2023
• In January 2022 Google retired FLoC due to privacy concerns and replaced it with TOPICS – a browser-based system that assigns a user a set of broad interests according to the websites they have visited.
• Most recently, Google announced that the deadline was going to be pushed to the end of 2024, as Google wanted to give the industry more time to evaluate and test their Privacy Sandbox technology

So although Google’s announcement means that tech companies and advertisers have more time to test and evaluate their options, advertisers shouldn’t take this as an excuse to delay these initiatives.  Sooner or later cookies will simply not be an option anymore and the industry will move forward. Those that have an established and well tested cookieless strategy are the ones that will come up on top.

What actions can brands and advertisers take? Well, here are a few ideas:

• Improve their 1P Data collection processes and increase their data base in size and quality
• Work with their agency and tech teams to test deterministic and probabilistic cookieless solutions
• Evaluation of innovative contextual targeting solutions
• Open identity solutions like UID 2.0
• 1P Data enhancement i.e lookalike of data modelling
• Work with walled gardens to evaluate their measurement solutions

Lastly I want to leave you with two last thoughts:

1. Keep in mind that there won’t be a singular solution that will completely replace cookies, rather, there will be a combination of tactics and technologies that combined will compose the new targeting and measurement strategies for advertisers
2. Testing and comparing results of cookie-based targeting and measurement solutions vs cookieless alternatives won’t be the best benchmark to understand efficacy.  Cookies simply won’t be an option anymore therefore previous performance won’t matter. Instead evaluate cookieless solutions based on what is the best fit for your brand and clients’ goals.