Why are third party cookies disappearing in the first place?
In 2019, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed that GDPR consent was now required for the placing of cookies and other technologies. This meant that, overnight, lots of websites became non-compliant. In that same year, the ICO launched an investigation into adtech and real-time bidding, but, with Covid-19 at the forefront, interest in cookies faded out.
With the pandemic gradually beginning to end, interest in cookies has swivelled back around in 2021, specifically around the inevitable death of them. One occurrence that led to the death of cookies was back in August 2020, when there was a privacy collective clash action against Salesforce and Oracle. By September, Oracle Data clouds stopped offering third-party data targeting services across Europe. And then finally, the news with Google was the nail in the coffin.
Google is centred around 65% of all browsers globally, so when the company announced they’re no longer supporting third-party cookies by 2022, it was a real game-changer
Julia says: “With the ICO, they’re not definitely going to take anything away from you, but they might make your life a bit difficult. That’s the biggest difference between the ICO’s involvement and the news about Google. Even though this has been coming for years, it’s like the rubber hits the road. It’s like: ‘Oh, gosh, I’m actually going to have to do something different now’.”
What happens if you don’t do anything?
So, the question is: what happens if marketers ignore this, and how will it affect their analytics? Julia explains that marketers are going to lose a lot of data if they choose to ignore the news.
She says: “Well, I think my understanding is that you’ll still be able to use Google Analytics on your own sites, but what they’re effectively doing is collecting all the data now and going to create these cohorts, which are your audience profiles. Then you can target your advertising against these cohorts so that you, the marketer, no longer get to see who those individuals are. You target cohorts now with new points of view, depending on how you are driving your marketing.”
So, what should marketers do in preparation?
Capture first party data
With the absence of third-party data, first-party data becomes the priority. For those who already have a database, they’re in a great place, but for those who haven’t, it’s time to start thinking about how to capture that first-party data. First-party data is more accurate, it’s directly from the source and it’s more relevant to your business.
Julia explains: “The IAB noted in its 2020 International Report on Programmatic In-Housing that respondents believed data quality had improved since GDPR as a result of these activities around pushing first-party data. And that consumer trust has improved and basically that’s good for everybody. We all want for us to improve because being bombarded with ads that don’t appear to be very relevant is something that has really bothered a lot of people.”
By having first-party data, you’ll be able to communicate and build trust with your customers and prospects more easily. The key focus then becomes persuading prospects that brands can be trusted to process their data.
Use AI-powered contextual advertising
AI-powered contextual advertising can also work to capture first party data and pinpoint media habits.
Julia continues: “Another area that will be growing is AI-powered contextual advertising. You can use AI to understand where relevant content is and then place those ads. So, if you’ve got some first party data, you can profile the customers, create profiles and be able to match that against the content.”
There’s also a lot of projects or suppliers who can help you do that, including The Ozone Project for consumer advertising. The platform brings advertisers and publishers together using first party fully compliant data to power advertising campaigns. Permutive is another product that creates segments based on how people consume content.
Julia explains: “These are solutions that are more edge computing solutions where personal data is processed on the device, rather than in the cloud. So, in fact you’re not sharing your data until you go to a site and start to consume their content.”
Look into data solutions emerging
Finally, in both the B2C and B2B space, there are a lot of collaborative data solutions. Especially with third party cookies, many data providers are trying to keep up.
Julia says: “You’ll see an awful lot of talk about pseudonymised data, data cooperatives, data marketplaces, technical data environments, and there are loads of these around actually, and it’s quite difficult to understand which ones are good and which ones aren’t.”
While Julia encourages marketers to investigate them, she also advises to make sure you do a data protection impact assessment to understand how that data is being processed and to ensure it’s not high risk. It’s also critical to make sure you’re not processing any sensitive data. Here’s where you can conduct your DPIA: https://gdpr.eu/data-protection-impact-assessment-template/
Here’s a checklist you can start to use:
In the meantime, you can start to investigate how you’re using data at the moment. Here’s a list of questions you can create to make sure you’re addressing the disappearance of third-party cookies:
- What are your current data sources? Bitstream, co-op, publisher, or a combination?
- Is data collected at corporate or contact level?
- If you collect any contact level data, do you use consent or LI as legal basis?
- If you use LI (legitimate interest), do you exclude sole traders and partners?
- If consent, how is that collected by third parties?
- How is that consent evidenced?
- How new/up to date is the data?
- Whatever you do, consider producing a DPIA – it gives you protection just in case the ICO calls.
