Third-party cookies have been a major part of marketing arsenals for twenty-five years. Designed to track online consumer behavior, they were embraced by almost every ad platform for display advertising, targeting and retargeting, and behavioral marketing uses.
However, the times are a-changin’! Cookies are no stranger to controversy, and smart cookie-blocking tech allows consumers to block cookies at will. New and evolving regulations, such as the all-encompassing GDPR and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), have driven this change in philosophy about how businesses can target potential customers.
A Significant Shift for Marketers
This fundamental change shouldn’t come as a surprise—there have been rumblings about how cookies undermine privacy and have contributed to skyrocketing identity theft numbers for years. Just as we said goodbye to Adobe Flash last year and quickly dried our tears, we’ll soon bid adieu to cookies, too.
What does this mean for your business? You’ll need to focus energies on other forms of advertising, marketing, and audience targeting. With the right tools and a forward-thinking approach, increasing market share in a post-cookie world shouldn’t be beyond any entrepreneur’s capability.
Why Have Cookies Been Given the Chop?
If you’re looking for a corporation to blame for the crumbling of cookies as a marketing tool, no need to look further than Apple.
Both Apple and Mozilla have featured third-party cookie defaults for some time, and yet they never quite managed to fill the code shortcomings that allowed ad networks to find and exploit them. The key differentiator between Apple and Google eventually comes down to privacy protection. In pursuit of this, Apple undertook a campaign to close those loopholes and block cookies once and for all. Firefox quickly followed suit, and Chrome wasn’t far behind.
The ITP and ETP, which form the foundation for the tech that blocks cookies, uses a deceptively simple approach — stopping them from being stored in the browser and then preventing these third-party cookies from being recorded as first-party equivalents. Indeed, Apple’s version — the ITP2 — slashes the lifespan of a first-party cookie from seven days to 24 hours. Both Firefox and Safari have these systems active by default at all times, for all users.
Will Google manage to scrape by without the profits that third-party cookies represent? Probably, but nobody is sure how, though there are plenty of whispers in the industry regarding what might replace them. It’s likely that consumers won’t notice a radical difference. It’s been a couple of years now since GDPR. Business owners have had to wrap their heads around what seemed to be insurmountable changes to their marketing, but ultimately survived the upheaval. Surely we’ll do the same with cookies.
Can Businesses Survive Without Cookies?
Let’s take a look now at how the cookie-tracking process you’ve come to rely on can be replaced. The fundamentals of online marketing like connecting with audiences, building consumer relationships, and learning what makes your market tick remain. Research, personalization, and carving out a market niche still make the online world go round, cookies or not.
Contextual Marketing Is King (Again)
Contextual advertising means that the adverts customers see are based on the content they view at a given moment, rather than an approximation of their entire online behavior. For example, if they’re looking at a blog about Swiss watches, they’ll start seeing adverts from Swiss watch brands. If they read articles about how to improve their business’s SEO, then relevant SEO service ads appear. It’s based on the simplest and most effective principles of desire-led advertising, and it’s going to work wonders for your business.
Targeting That Puts People First
To say that Facebook changed the world of marketing would be an understatement. People-based advertising, the pioneering technique of the social media platform, proposed a truly groundbreaking principle into marketing: to rely on unique identifiers that were based upon an individual rather than a device. Eschewing the need for cookies or data collection, it allowed brands to build connections with consumers, enabling them to meet at times and places that encouraged a new type of engagement.
The Future of Marketing Beckons
It’s jarring to consider that cookies are a quarter of a century old, yet in the face of their coming disappearance, we can take comfort in the fact that all aging tech inevitably gets replaced by something better.
We’ll be exploring new innovations within a matter of months, and striking that all-important balance between customer privacy and profit, learning from the mistakes of the past and ensuring a safer, more profitable future. For now, we need to focus on making the most of the first-party data we can obtain and encouraging the brand engagement that never fails to support the most effective, efficient, and energizing marketing strategies.
