The death of cookies is NOT the end of MarTech

In case you missed it, cookies are dead. Last week Google announced they’re eliminating third-party cookies from Chrome browsers within 2 years. Chrome is 66% of the market, so that’s the knock-out punch for cookies, already on the ropes after Apple’s previous move to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) eliminating cookie tracking in Safari starting in 2017.

Here’s why the death of cookies is not the end of MarTech: Cookies were a weak solution to an important problem and they’ve been lame for years. 

Here’s what’s always been wrong with Cookies. 

• They expire rapidly. 80% of cookies are only seen ONCE, making them completely useless for tracking users across sites or collecting meaningful information.
• They’re dumb. They only contain limited information like “this browser was on webpage A, saw an ad and later visited webpage B.” That’s not much insight for understanding consumer motivations and intent.
• There’s too many of them. I have different cookies in my mobile browser, my work laptop, my personal laptop browser. These different glimpses don’t give an accurate picture of what I’m really doing when I’m shopping or researching.

...BUT WHAT ABOUT MY AUDIENCES?!?!

It’s true that most programmatic media and retargeting is purchased using cookies today, and a lot of other AdTech solutions are currently dependent on cookies. However, as described above, they aren't good tools for this job -- they're still used primarily because of inertia. Consumer intelligence and targeting are evolving and new solutions are already here to replace old cookie tech.

So what’s next?

Many sophisticated marketers have already graduated from cookies to a more advanced identity resolution that includes multiple identifiers. A real identity solution combines multiple online IDs like email address, mobile ad id (MAID), IP addresses (and yes, cookies too), and validates their connection using app log-ins (think Facebook) and other signals to build a rich tapestry woven from many fractional identifiers that have been tested and found to be a consistent, cohesive picture of a specific individual across multiple devices and online contexts. When done right, these data points are corroborated and updated constantly.

This collection of online identifiers is further enhanced with offline identifiers like phone number, mailing address, and other distinct attributes that resolve online and offline “identities” to a true people-based ID solution. This ID can reflect an individual or be grouped into households. Once you have an accurate and consistent view of the person and their household, it's easy to overlay 1st and 3rd party data for segmentation and audience building, and then activate those audiences in both online and offline channels, using a persistent ID (not a cookie) for targeting in DMPs, DSPs, Email, Direct Mail, and even Advanced TV.

This is clearly so much better than a cookie. It’s accurate and actionable for marketers, and it’s privacy safe for consumers.

Google's announcement made it very clear that they are continuing to work with the ecosystem to explore new ways to improve the online experience for consumers while protecting privacy. Accurate tracking and targeting leads to a better online experience for consumers and improves advertising effectiveness for marketers while raising profits for publishers. Furthermore using IDs as described instead of cookies accomplishes all this while maintaining user privacy. These are the forces driving innovation around identity. I predict IDs of the future will be better than cookies in many ways, and that there will be good solutions for understanding and reaching consumers for years to come.

I'm very interested in discussing further with anyone in the space - so let me know your thoughts - what did I miss?

PS - Apologies to Samuel Clemens for the miss-quote - I always like the melody better this way

Wordcloud: #customerdata #CCPA #GDPR #DMP #CDP #cookies #cookieless #cookielessworld #privacy