Google killing third-party cookies is not the end of the world

Quite a few people have asked me how I feel about Google’s recent announcement about its plans to discontinue the support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years.

Some have been very concerned about the ad-tech ecosystem in general, but my personal view is that Google’s move is the right thing to do, and is a natural evolution that we have expected for some time.

For the last three years, AudienceProject has been investing heavily in and building solutions that do not require third-party cookies. Relying purely on third-party cookies to stitch together the complex media behaviour patterns of today, has, in my opinion, not been an option for a long time.

Third-party cookies were never great to begin with

People tend to forget that third-party cookies have been a dubious data source for many years. But many chose to ignore it, probably because it was easier than finding real answers to the issue. Let me remind you about the problems regarding cross-device and cross-browser deduplication, ad blockers, IoT, ITP, GDPR, etc. A constant flow of new solutions was required to keep delivering a unified picture of media consumption across platforms, devices, browsers and applications.

We have been prepared for years

Today, we already deliver a wide range of services that don’t rely directly on third-party cookies – or cookies at all.

To mention a few: Our integration to linear TV, our addressable TV measurement solution (measuring Apple TVs, Rokus, Smart TVs etc.), our Integrated Reporting solution integrating both Facebook and YouTube viewership numbers with traditional digital advertisements, our in-app measurement solution, etc. AudienceProject has for years been busy delivering solutions to cover all these non-cookie environments on an ongoing basis.

We believe Google’s announcement will have an impact on many of our clients. Therefore, in the upcoming weeks and months, we will start sharing more insights on how everything from effect measurement to targeting digital audiences and estimating reach in many scenarios already works in post-third-party-cookie environments. The future is already here.

New opportunities lie ahead

For those interested, we also plan to dive into greater detail on the exciting new opportunities that the Google Privacy Sandbox offers. It’s a proposed set of new web standards designed to protect privacy while still giving advertisers the ability to target and measure campaigns. The introduction of these tools will, in my opinion, require a mindset change across the industry, from a simple descriptive analytics approach (which hasn’t worked well for many years anyway) to an inferred statistics approach, which has been AudienceProject’s preferred approach since its inception.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll share info on a lot of these initiatives through our blog and newsletter.

Learn more

Feel free to reach out to hello@audienceproject.com or your usual contact at AudienceProject if you want to learn more.

This article is 1 of 4 in our series: Life beyond third-party cookies

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Currently reading

Article 1: Google killing third-party cookies is not the end of the world

2

February 25, 2020

Article 2: How to measure true effect without third-party cookies

3

November 19, 2020

Article 3: Personalized marketing in a post-cookie-world

4

March 22, 2021

Article 4: Killing the Cookie Won’t Kill Cross-Media Audience Measurement

About this article series

Google decision to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome has led to concerns on how the ad-tech ecosystem will be influenced. In this series of articles, AudienceProject addresses those concerns and explains why Google has made the right move.