MarTech Thoughts | Manish Gambhir

How do you see the ecosystem changing in the next 2 years with the deprecation of the 3rd party cookies?

For the longest time, advertising cookies and advertising IDs (device IDs) have been the foundation for rich user profiles and to enable relevant advertising targeting, personalization and attribution. Third party cookies are placed by advertisers, publishers to store information on user’s browsers to gather information about their interests and websites they have visited.

These cookie information can go across websites and be shared across multiple technology players within the advertising ecosystem. Google recently announced the removal of third-party cookies in 2 years’ time, similar steps were taken by Firefox browser. Most recently, Apple announced new measures as a part of its privacy protection in iOS 14 by making the IDFA explicitly for all applications. Apps will now need to seek user’s permission before the app can use the identifier for tracking purposes.

Impact and Alternatives:

1. Third-party DMP data based on a cookie or digital ID will be obsolete and likely will have no relevance.
2. The ability to attribute conversions will get tougher, the fingerprinting mechanism might come handy.
3. Omnichannel marketing across multiple DSPs becomes a challenge.
4. Reliance on (FAGA) or walled gardens would increase, FB, Apple, Google, Amazon
5. First party data will be the new normal though it would require CDPs to play a major role, though this new framework would lead to rising cost of integration and real time targeting.
6. Evolution of new publisher consortiums where multiple publishers would share their first party cookies to build common audiences.
7. CDPs which are built on first party data foundation would solve multiple challenges such as customer journey, offline to online, attribution based on first party datasets.
8. Contextual Targeting - Reliance on publisher content and keywords would play a major role rather than individual customer third party identity.

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