Google: The Real Cookie Monster

We’ve been hearing a lot about the death of the cookie over the past few years, but it seems like Google has put the final nail in the coffin. In less than two years Google Chrome, the browser used by more than half of the internet, will stop supporting third party cookies, the tiny snippets of code that allow for audience targeting, view-through measurement, attribution and all the other things that support a (currently) robust ad-tech ecosystem. Given that we have two years to wrap our heads around this sea-change in how digital advertising works, there are a few things that are apparent, even this early on.

1) Business as usual will not continue:

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are the known unknowns, and then there are the unknown unknowns. 

Third party cookies support a massive amount of the current ad tech ecosystem. All the third party audience targeting you use for your digital campaigns? So long. Multi touch attribution? Nope. (Can I interest you in old-school last click attribution?). View through reporting? Bye-bye. Retargeting as we know it? Gone. OK, maybe there is at least a little bright side. 

Google says they will create a “privacy sandbox” that lives at the browser level and offer anonymized, aggregated data, but no one has seen what that looks like. Maybe there will be enough there for some semblance of tracking to continue, and I’m sure that smart ad-tech companies will figure out how to make it work for their use cases. 

Certainly, AI is going to play a major part in audience modeling. If you have your cookie-based audiences today, you can start to model out all the factors that make a user part of that audience (browsing behavior, location, app usage, device type, URL, etc.), and then use the signals that will still exist to model those audiences. Not great, but not terrible. I’m sure a lot of data scientists are working on this as we speak. 

I hesitate to say that the programmatic ecosystem as we know it today will be unrecognizable since I don’t want to bet against companies like The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Rubicon, etc., but big changes are coming. Maybe the DSPs’ big push into OOH, audio, CTV and linear TV will help offset the decline in digital advertising as they become true omni-channel platforms.

2) Content (and context) is king (again):

As our friends in linear TV are fond of saying, “content is king”, and it will reign again. However, another important royal (Queen? Prince or Princess? Duke?) will be context. It used to be in the pre-audience targeting days that if you were an auto advertiser, you ran your ads on endemic sites like Cars.com, Edmunds, Kelly Blue Book, etc. These ads always performed better anyway. When will consumers be more interested in a car ad, when they are reading about their favorite sports team or a movie review, or when they are actually researching their next car purchase?

Place-based out of home (which is obviously near and dear to me) has the advantage of having powerful built-in context. What better place to reach shoppers than at the mall? Looking to reach fitness enthusiasts? How about screens in gyms? What about your B2B campaign or your luxury product? How about reaching high income professionals during the day in office elevators? As a digital refugee now working in the out of home world, I’m personally interested to see how this impacts the out of home business in the coming years. 

The same way that content and context will reassert itself online, OOH provides an opportunity to provide unique context and content.

3) The rich get richer:

The companies that currently rely on third party cookies are going to have to adapt, and luckily for them, they have a fair amount of runway to do so. Let’s not forget, there is already a blind spot from Safari’s and Mozilla’s similar moves over the past few years, so it is not like this is unprecedented. The big difference is that Apple is not in the digital advertising business, while Google is. In some ways, Google IS the digital advertising business. The difference between Safari and Chrome is that Safari blocks all third party cookies, and while Google will too, a Google Chrome cookie is considered by Google to be a first party cookie. Google still gets to track all your browsing behavior via their own first party browser based cookie. Lucky them! 

Large, scalable publishers with logged in audiences will have the opportunity to leverage their own audience data to segment out your audience based on their on-site behaviors as a replacement for third party audience targeting.  Is this ideal? No. Better than nothing? Absolutely. 

Other data-rich companies with walled gardens will grow stronger. Facebook and Amazon will do well, of course. A dark horse in this is Verizon. They are a publisher with a wide variety of scalable sites, a solid tech backbone, and (maybe someday) Verizon Wireless data. That’s a good combination in a third-party cookieless world, so I would keep an eye on them.

What will the future hold? 

Who knows? But one thing is crystal clear. The big winner in all of this is…you guessed it…Google. In the name of privacy, they are building their walled garden walls even higher at the expense of the rest of the ad-tech ecosystem.