Concrete Steps to Prepare for a Cookieless Future
by Digilant VP of Product, Wes Faris, via Street Fight
Many digital advertisers breathed a huge sigh of relief when Google postponed its announced ban on third-party cookies from early 2022 to 2023, giving the industry more time to adapt.
But this was not a reprieve but a delay of the inevitable.
A largely cookieless digital future, at least on desktops, remains squarely on the horizon, and smart marketers should be using this gift of extra time to get a better handle on identity solutions and the other tools and strategies that will be needed to execute and measure campaigns without the real-time retargeting enabled by cookies.
No one has to make dramatic changes just yet. But allocating a five-15% budget now for cookieless programs can enable advertisers to determine the best choice for them among the identity solutions providers looking to offer cookie replacements.
Identity solutions coming from LiveRamp, Lotame, and Parrable, and a host of emerging startups can do some heavy lifting currently done by cookies. These identity solutions essentially serve the same tracking function as a cookie but are based on a hashed email or other anonymized identifiers.
Because they’ll almost certainly be opt-in, what these identity solutions won’t do, at least not initially, is scale.
The biggest change for digital marketers who’ve grown comfortable with cookies is realizing that the future may not be nearly as automated as it is now. Executing campaigns without cookies will require more hands-on strategizing and monitoring of campaigns, and it will force marketers to be proactive when it comes to culling third-party data providers and ad-tech partners that rely too heavily on cookies for their data and analytics.