Goodbye Cookies, and Good Luck

Reading up on the advertising news recently and I am going to have to admit, I am a little confused. On the one hand, there have been several breathless stories recently about Google starting to deprecate their cookie. Now, this impacted 1% of Chrome users, but the clutching of pearls was truly epic. Google is trying to spin this as maintaining an “open web” but we all now where their bread is buttered, and although they are sitting on a pile of first party data, the programmatic side are losing their minds.

Then I read other articles where folks are more sanguine about this, and they should be— since Google has been telegraphing this for years. But the cookies good, cookies bad actually completely misses the point, which tends to happen when people are holding on desperately to how things used to be, regardless of how well it will work in the future. It’s not about the cookies, it’s about whether we are tracking the right thing for moving forward as an industry.

This headline caught my eye “Despite The Hype, Conversions Are A Poor Ad-Currency Choice.” Now this stopped me in my tracks because Tony Parisi and I are writing a book right now, and this is one of the central themes, that we need to shake ourselves loose from the old archetypes of the funnel, and awareness to consideration to purchase. It’s one of the things that is gumming up our desire as marketers to build communities around our brands.

So this may seem a little controversial, but we are ready for the cookie to disappear into the dustbin of history because it has led to some terrible habits in marketing. We were able to hide them under the rug of volume and footprint, but now that our audience is getting younger, and the need to get more focused on community and conversation, we need to make this break, and now is the perfect time.

It’s weird isn’t it, that brands want to have more of a relationship with their audience, but we are still using the old metrics and measurements to track the efficacy against a funnel. And there are all sorts of problems there, from pitching an audience that isn’t interested (we do ok with this) to an audience who is interested but just not now (we are terrible at this). And Tony and I believe deep in our nefarious hearts that the problem is we are spending all our time trying to figure out how brands connect to their audiences, and less time figuring out what connects our audience to each other.

Now granted, we both come from the trenches of the metaverse going back to the 90s, but many of the dynamics we saw in this narrow part of the market is starting to leak out into marketing in general. What makes a community, what makes an audience want to invest, what makes an audience want to come back. Seriously, we learned quickly in virtual worlds that getting people to come is easy, but getting them to come back is hard.

So maybe instead of looking at how we have done marketing in the past to figure out the future, we should look at the past of the metaverse to figure out the future. Because guess what, we have been doing this community thing for a very long time. And without cookies. So trust us when we say…it’s going to be a better world without them.