7 MIN READ

Cookies: a defining feature of “modern” online advertising. The small data files used by web servers to save browsing information, cookies are used to identify your device in order to provide a more personalized user experience. 

But why the sarcastic quotes? Because there’s really nothing modern about cookies at all. In fact, they have existed for nearly as long as the internet. And yet marketers continue to use them in order to target audiences because, well, what other options are there? 

According to a survey by Ogury and IDC, the majority of marketers agree that cookies and IDs are disappearing and 64% are willing to increase their budgets towards methods that don't rely on personal data collection. But the problem is only 40% are even aware of non-cookie based alternatives.

So as we continue the steady march towards a cookie-less future, marketers are rethinking their consumer identification strategies. And, as a result, how new audiences can be targeted, reached, and converted. Because it’s one thing to build consumer identities from first, second, and third-party data and quite another to continue to increase marketing efficiencies when the very landscape of consumer identification is in a continual upheaval. 

Don’t you just hate when that happens? 

To make matters worse, we don’t know when, exactly, we won’t be able to rely on any form of cookie. Google has announced the elimination of third-party cookies from Chrome later this year, but how will that impact other browsers? As there is (naturally) no consensus in the industry on what the future holds, let’s look back then.

How We’ve Been Using Cookies

We’ve been using cookies for decades for essentially two purposes: 1) to provide more streamlined online experiences and 2) to analyze online behavior.

A better UX, in large part, is thanks to first-party cookies. These are the cookies that are created by the host domain—the one in which a user is visiting. In addition to keeping your session open, first-party cookies store information like language preferences, usernames, and are capable of communicating user data with e-commerce sites. It’s the reason why a website will remember whether you’ve added something to their shopping cart. 

Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are placed on a user’s device by a company other than the one they’re visiting online. They are used mostly for collecting data and tracking users through cross-site tracking, retargeting, and ad-serving. 

These are the types of cookies that have been the topic of debate for some time now as they deal with a user’s privacy. We could (and eventually will) dedicate another blog post to all of those privacy concerns and how best to protect yourself, your brands’ users, and society at large, but in the meantime we’re going to focus on pivoting from cookies. 

P.S. If you're looking to learn more about data, how you can leverage it (for good!), and create a better personalized consumer experience for your audiences, check out our recent blog. 

No Cookie–Now What?

As we shift away from cookie-first tracking, several new schools of thought are gaining popularity as marketers seek new ways to connect with consumers. 

Persona Marketing

Consumer personas have been the bedrock of marketing strategies since, well, since the beginning of marketing, but have largely relied on data with the rise of cookies. Now that first-party data is much harder to come by without free-reign access to cookies, companies like Ogury are looking to solve the problem by reinventing personas. As the global leader in user-driven advertising and data mining,  Ogury’s had a plan in place for a cookie-less future for nearly a decade. The company has been building a fully consented dataset since 2014 and now uses that dataset to build groups with similar interests. From there, those groups are matched to those with correlating interest groups based on the millions of pages Ogury has access to through its publisher relationships. 

Another avenue marketers are pursuing when building out their personas is artificial intelligence. In its current iteration, ad-tech suppliers are relying on generative AI and language modeling to crawl the world wide web. This helps their bots develop better clarity around the needs and motivations of audiences that can then be applied to your data and existing data sets.

Encrypted Data

But marketers are not wholly sold on a persona-only world that doesn’t rely on identifiers. Stock is being put into hashed email addresses, which is essentially encrypting an email address while still protecting a user’s privacy. With a hashed email address, you can track even more data than you could with cookies. Both cookies and hashed email addresses will collect behavioral data, but only hashed emails allow tracking across mobile, multiple devices, and multi-browsers—not to mention Google’s update won’t have any major impact on them for now.  

As you’re rethinking your consumer identifications strategies, keep these options in mind. Now is the time to move your data to a privacy-first model and to move away from the last-click method to measure campaign effectiveness. Instead, treat your data as a foundational element of your campaigns rather than a commodity that’s thrown in as an afterthought. Investing time in learning about how ad-tech suppliers are changing and how these changes can fit into your marketing strategy will set up your brand for long-term success as the upcoming shifts in data gathering play out. 

If all of this has left you feeling overwhelmed or you simply don’t know where to get started, we can help. Reach out to us today to learn how we can support your brand in navigating a cookie-less future.