Google’s (Sort of) Nevermind

After literally four years of Google promising it will deprecate cookies in the Chrome browser “soon” the company finally said what many have long suspected: It ain’t happening. Not this year. Not ever.

But does that mean the industry is worse off for the exercise? The answer is no, and for many reasons.

1. The entire exercise gave the industry the time and space to really consider the third-party cookie. Many came to the conclusion that as the lynchpin of audience building, targeting, and campaign measurement, they were not great. Cookies were never meant for all the tasks we assigned to them.
2. The third-party cookie and its incessant tracking angered the consumer, and they got regulators across the globe on their side. That kind of negative scrutiny just isn’t good for anyone, especially for publications that are simply seeking to fund the news through journalism.
3. The fear of cookie loss led to many in the industry to re-imagine what advertising can be. We’ve seen a lot of new ideas and innovation result from this exercise, some of which are just as invasive as the cookie, frankly. But it’s hard to deny that there is a real effort to move to a state where advertising is both effective and respectful to the consumer’s privacy.
4. In some corners, at least, we’ve abandoned the truly kooky promises of the mid-aughts: one-to-one advertising.

Power to the People

The best part of Google’s announcement is the fact that it puts power into the hands of the consumer. Specifically, the company said:

“[we] are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”

So power to the people!

As Eric Seufert points out in his newsletter , this is a lot like Apple's ATT, which allowed iOS users to opt out of app tracking. Given the horror stories of healthcare apps tracking unbeknownst to the user -- and that data being sold behind their backs -- the ATT feature got a lot of attention and use. Some 85% of people opted out of tracking, prompting Mark Zuckerberg to take out full page ads saying , “we’re sticking up for small businesses.”

Seufert notes that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), while supportive of ATT, falls short of a full-throated endorsement. He notes in another post that ATT asks, “Allow this app to track your activity…” while Apple refers to its own tracking as “personalization”. Tracking for thee. Personalization for me.

Beware of Speed Bumps (They Don’t Protect Privacy)

But consent is a funny thing, to be honest. Take GDPR. This sweeping regulation was supposed to be an engine of informed decision making on the part of the consumer. When we arrive at a website a banner asks us to think about the data this site intends to collect and use, and do we want to allow that to occur?

And while technically all consumers could learn more if they wanted to, the initial cookie banners and explanations were confusing and unclear. Even people in the industry found them difficult to understand. Could your grandparents figure them out? No way!

It didn’t take long for people to develop the habit of clicking “yes” so they could continue with the task at hand. In other words, consent became a speed bump in the road, one that slowed users down but didn’t really make them think.

That’s the danger with opting in. After one or two times users will just opt in as a matter of course because to do otherwise just slows them down.

The other danger is for marketers who may count on wide availability of third-party cookies to execute and measure campaigns. If users opt out en masse, you’ll still need an alternative to cookies, even though technically they’re not deprecated.

The Conversation We Should Be Having

We’ve never supported tracking users for advertising purposes under any conditions. We never liked tracking, and we’re not fans of user ID resolution graphs, which replicate the functionality of the cookie under a different guise.

Why? People look at all sorts of stuff on the web because they can. They don’t need to walk into a showroom and be accosted by a salesperson if they just want to look at a new line of autos. They can look, wish, dream, or gloat because they have a different brand of car, then never give the topic another thought for the rest of their lives.

Looking does not equal purchasing intent. And yet millions of “auto intender” consumers have been sold to marketers -- way more so-called in-market auto buyers than cars sold each year.

Tracking does absolutely nothing to qualify a consumer. Does the consumer live in a city where parking is scarce and public transportation is plentiful?

All too often, tracking picks up on temporary passing interests and assumes a purchase is imminent. So in addition to angering the consumer, it makes a lot of assumptions that are stupid.

So let’s stop discussing the best one-to-one user tracking mechanism in a post-cookie world or hoping that users decide to opt in en masse. Instead, let’s focus on capturing the consumer's interest by showing them ads for products they genuinely need and that are relevant to their lives.

And yeah, it’s possible. We do it every day.