In a January 2020 blog post Justin Schuh, Director of Chrome Engineering at Google, announced Privacy Sandbox, a project designed to phase out 3rd-party cookies on its Chrome browser. It will take two years, with 3rd party cookies fully phased out by 2022. In the meantime, Google is working on alternative solutions that will make consumer data more secure but still allow for targeted advertising.
With this announcement, many of our peers and clients have asked what this means for their brands, their marketing strategy, and their own personal information. We’ve outlined our take on this news here.
What does this mean for marketers?
Programmatic advertising – which helps us target the right audience regardless of where they are – relies on 3rd party cookies for targeting and measurement. We explain the difference between programmatic and endemic advertising in a previous post. These cookies are designed to follow users across the internet, tracking their behaviors to generate virtual user profiles. This is a powerful and effective tool for personalized advertising and conversion tracking but created concerns for consumer privacy.
So why mess with a good thing? By eliminating third-party cookies, Google better protects user data. It’s a move that forces the industry to adapt and come up with new ways to track conversions and target users. Consumers get greater protection, and programmatic publishers get alternate means of monetization.
Google Chrome represents 69% of online activity on desktop and 40% on mobile. Given that the leading mobile browser, Apple’s Safari, already prevented the use of tracking cookies in 2018, the ability to use 3rd-party cookies will be virtually gone when Google completes this transition in 2022.
What does this mean for our brands and yours?
The burden of finding an alternate targeting methodology largely falls on Google and a brand’s digital partners. Over the next two years, they will work together to develop solutions that allow some of the same capabilities as 3rd-party tags (behavioral targeting, conversion tracking, frequency capping, etc.).
At R+K, we’ll address this with each of our partners to understand and evaluate the new solution that they provide. Some programmatic partners have already anticipated this cookie-less shift and have robust data sets for targeting that are not reliant on 3rd-party cookies. Depending on the viability of these new solutions, there could be a shift in our recommendations for digital investment toward partners with robust 1st-party data or alternate forms of targeting (in particular, Social and CTV/OTT).
Drop us a note to see how we can help you determine the right strategy.