Third-party cookies have been the backbone of programmatic advertising since the latter was launched with the first banner ad in 1994. Picking up those small bits of consumer information as people browse around the internet, third-party cookies inform marketers and publishers’ campaigns, allowing them to create more targeted ads based on user patterns and behaviour.
All that looks set to end, with even COVID-19 failing to put a stop (so far at least) in Google’s two-year plan, announced in January 2019, to finally eliminate the cookie from its hugely influential Chrome browser. With nearly three-quarters of the US desktop market (69%) and approaching half of all mobiles (40%), Google clearly dominates the market. Apple, with 52% of the US mobile share has already locked down user tracking.
What blocking third-party cookies means
For unprepared businesses, removing third-party cookies from major browsers has pretty significant implications. Without the ability to track customers across platforms, companies will have to revisit their cross-channel media buying strategies.
Personalisation becomes almost impossible in that environment, as data becomes limited to activities within the walled gardens, or limited to first-party data on sites with log-ins. As customers have come to expect personalised content as the baseline in most communication, this puts businesses at a disadvantage.
How companies’ data management platforms (DMPs) currently serve campaign data will also need to change. Without being able to rely on third-party cookies to create associations between data points, they won’t be able to provide buyer insights. Even lookalike audiences will begin to fail.
Finding transparent sources of data
This may all sound slightly post-apocalyptic – Google’s way or the highway – but there is an alternative. Just as Google’s decision to ban third-party cookies comes as a result of more stringent data regulation in both Europe and the US, data companies should be striving to find more ethical customer data. More responsibly sourced data, in other words.
Of course, brands still worry that customers knowing that they monetise their data breeds mistrust. However, it’s disingenuous to believe that customers don’t know their data is mined and shared for marketing purposes, among other things. The critical element is that the process is completely transparent, that they receive relevant value for sharing that data and that they can be confident their data is held and used securely.
To access the required levels of personalisation while maintaining data integrity and accuracy outside the third-party cookie universe, it starts to make sense for brands to use a data co-op like Adara, which has a data rights management platform that gives the data owner control over when and where it is used.
Using that data to build identities
Data alone isn’t enough, however. It is the relationships between data that build a truly valuable picture of the consumer that advertisers can then use to target effectively. This is the essential step in moving from a cookie-based world, to an identity-driven one.
Building identities takes a series of data points and layering them on top of first-party data, connecting them all to create a single, anonymised profile. We call this the identity graph. The data industry is still in relatively uncharted waters and, as yet, there is no current market standard for building out those identities into a single, unified graph. Companies and industries each have different methodologies for building, storing and trading identity. Publishers may use log-in data, retailers and travel companies may focus on their loyalty schemes.
That said, there is an advantage to variety across different identity graphs, with each variant providing a unique insight into the sector’s consumer base. Adara has a 600 million strong identity graph, making up 5,000 distinct traveller segments. From this, clients are able to mix and match the data sets they need for their target customer group.
To reduce their reliance on the third-party cookie, and regain control over customer acquisition, companies are going to have to wean themselves off their dependence. And this will mean making some fundamental changes to the way they store and manage customer data. New sources will need to be explored, and disciplines to data sharing adopted. All this with one eye on increasing, not reducing, protections around individual customer information to maintain both regulatory compliance and trust. Identity, like data, needs to be sourced ethically. So for brands to share registration data, they need to share with the clear understanding of the usages and distribution of the registration data and provide that transparency to the end user.
The death of the third party cookie is a monumental landmark and the first significant sea change in how online advertising strategy has been developed since it began, nearly three decades ago. But it can easily be viewed as a significant opportunity, instead of a catastrophe, by brands that are willing to prepare. Google fired the starting gun with two years to spare but now is not the time to dawdle.
About the Author
Charles Mi
CTO, Adara
Charles Mi has been the Chief Technology Officer at Adara for nearly a decade. Adara is the world’s travel data co-op, and leading provider of traveler intelligence. At Adara, Charles develops actionable data-driven technology that provides unique traveler insights for brands worldwide. Before Adara, Charles was the Co-Founder and CTO at OpenMind, a sentiment analysis company. Previously, Charles worked in several technology roles at IBM. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.S in Computer Science from Stanford.