The cookie is (almost) dead. Long live the…what exactly?
They finally did it.
After much anticipation, Google has announced they will be disabling third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users starting Q1 2024. The news increases the probability substantially for the complete deprecation of cookies on Chrome by their deadline of H2 2024.
This is now real, it’s time to accept it is happening and understand that if you haven’t started exploring ways to future-proof your business to function without cookies, then now is the time to get started.
We’ve been preparing for this change. One of Encore’s core strengths has been through our exclusive data partnerships with publishers, governing bodies and research companies in the B2B, automotive and finance sectors. That has allowed us to build non-assumptive, highly targeted audiences for advertisers to target across the web. In the saturated programmatic vendor marketplace, this has given us our unique identity and is what clients have always bought into.
But guess what. Most of this data has historically been, you guessed it, cookie-based. As a result, since the first rumblings about cookie’s began, we have been busy testing a multitude of cookieless solutions that get a deeper insight into performance so we can ascertain what works and what doesn’t. This level of preparation is what makes us so confident our unique offering is futureproofed.
So how do we see this playing out? What is going to offer the best preparation for the change?
The currency analogy
At Encore, the currency analogy is commonplace amongst the team as it best sums up what we believe is going to happen.
Think of the cookie as a widely used currency. Now think of that currency is about to be discontinued and will effectively be worthless. The first question that comes to mind is, what currency is going to replace it?
Well, the truth is, the answer is not simple. We believe that if you want to be able to offer the same targeting and campaign scale to advertisers, instead of one all-encompassing Cookieless ID solution, programmatic vendors like us will need to adopt several different solutions in combination. This could be Lotame’s Panorama ID solution for one type of audience targeting and UID for another. The truth is, no one really knows the right answer so now is the time to be trialling and testing as many different Cookieless ID solutions as possible to both see what targeting functionalities and scale each offer.
Chrome Privacy Sandbox
As the deadline approaches, Google are providing a lot more clarity, which means Ad Tech providers can begin to build over the top of Chrome APIs and we should start to see developments start to unfold over the next 6 months. It really is an exciting time as we start to see the emergence of new ad tech solutions utilising Privacy Sandbox. It gives companies like ours the ability to implement solutions that offer the same level of targeting and performance for their clients.
Scale
The big unknown. Whilst many technology companies are releasing Cookieless ID solutions that seem to have a strong rationale behind them and on face value, seem to function; the big unknown is whether these solutions will enable companies like Encore to scale audience-targeting campaigns like they used to be able to via cookie solutions. Right now, it’s impossible to tell and we’re not going to know until the cookie is gone.
What’s our hunch? Scale will diminish to some extent, which is why we are testing as many solutions as possible. Where one solution may suffer in scaling a particular strategy, another may pick up the shortfall. So test, test and test some more!
Contextual targeting may not be the silver bullet
Don’t get me wrong, contextual targeting is a fantastic way of reaching your audience and is a strategy that we at Encore use for nearly all our campaigns. After all, it’s a no-brainer to want to target a user who has consumed content relevant to your product or service.
However using data to build a user profile and targeting the segment of users across multiple sites is something that advertisers have really bought into, invested heavily in and see as a key part of their marketing mix. Therefore, thinking that all that investment is going to be pushed back into contextual strategies and publishers would be somewhat short-sighted. A lot of the Cookieless ID solutions out there offer a great replacement to the cookie so get to know them, test them and think about how you can reach your audience with them because if you don’t, your competitors will.
Tech agnostic partners offer more solutions
What I’m referring to here is the ability to have a flexible programmatic tech stack where you can seamlessly pivot to different DSPs, DMPs and SSPs etc depending on the objective an advertiser is trying to achieve. A lot of programmatic vendors are wedded to a particular part of the programmatic pipeline for several reasons, whether it be for trading deal reasons or investment limitations. This is surely going to hinder their ability to be flexible enough to A/B test and trial different ID solutions and offer advertisers the best targeting solutions available.
At Encore, we’ve built an offering that isn’t wed to a particular tech provider which means when the cookieless world arrives, we’ll be able to offer our clients the right targeting solution for their campaign. We have seats with multiple DSPs such as MeditaMath and DV360 because certain strategies work better with one or the other. This is also going to be the case when it comes to Cookieless ID solutions.
Some are going to integrate better with certain DSPs than others, so it’s important that we are constantly assessing and making tweaks to our tech stack. That could mean integrating with more DSPs or investing in certain DMPs that have a robust solution. The benefit of this to advertisers is that we are going to have more flexibility and can pivot to offer not just the best value, but also the right solution to our clients.
Making sure your current data providers are prepared
As mentioned earlier, one of Encore’s main strengths is the ability to offer exclusive data segments for our clients to target across the web. This data isn’t available anywhere else so clients have to engage directly with us to be able to use it. This does mean however that our data partners are the lifeblood of our unique proposition, so we are working closely with them to ensure that they are also prepared for the shift. Whilst we will be collecting data from them in a different way, data consent streams will still be in place and be an important part of ensuring that businesses collect data in a responsible and privacy-conscious way. That is why we have been working with our data partners for a couple of years now, vetting their privacy policies, consent mechanisms and ensuring that they are futureproofing our ability to collect data and use it for our campaigns.
In summary
I do however caveat this all with the assumption that there will be more twists and turns in a long-running saga that will culminate with the end of the cookie. No one can really be sure exactly what will happen next.
What is certain without a shadow of a doubt, is that this is going to happen and advertisers need to choose their programmatic partners based on who is best prepared for this new future.
Regardless of any further timeline shifts, Encore is and has been prioritising the exploration and testing of Cookieless ID solutions so we are ready to continue offering our clients the same unique, first-in-class way of engaging with their audiences that we have been offering for over a decade.