Year of Signal Loss - Scene Setting / Sunsetting 3rd Party Cookies

Last updated: 17 June 2024 to reflect the third Chrome cookie deprecation delay, to 2025.

In the beginning, there was the banner ad. Famously displayed on the Wired website, back when it was still called Hotwired. ‘Have you ever clicked your mouse right here’ appeared in 1994. And the 44% of people clicking on it had no idea where it would take them.??

In those days, little or no personal data passed in the serving of an ad. With the advent of real-time bidding in the 2010s, came a step change: hundreds of datapoints were being exchanged via innumerable third parties, in fractions of a second.??

You can see the 2020s as a process of whittling those signals down once again – whether that be via new laws, at browser or even operating system-level. 3rd party cookies have received most attention of late, due to their widespread usage – and Google Chrome ’s shifting deadline to phase them out. But cookies are without doubt one part of a wider trend.??

In this and upcoming posts, we summarise the various datapoints out there, where they stand right now and in future - and what we can learn from them.?

1 – 3rd Party Cookies?

Cookies have come to encompass so many different uses in advertising – not just around targeting, but also tying into identity and measurement too.? Hence the intense focus on Google phasing them out in Chrome.?

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Firefox and Safari ended support for third-party cookies in 2019 and 2020 respectively. For Google’s Chrome browser, the process was delayed three times - complicated by its size and competition concerns. Even after Google seemed to confirm that 2024’s cookie deadline wouldn’t budge again, a further pause came into force from the Competition and Markets Authority ’s side.??

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But Nano’s own surveys of consumers, both in the UK and Germany, suggest all of the above may be missing a broader point. They found that 7 out of 10 UK consumers – and even more, around 76% in Germany – were effectively already pre-empting the shutdown, using their own methods to limit or even shut down people-based tracking completely.??

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Given the complexity of Google’s Topics API cookie replacement, and potential pushbacks from the CMA, the publisher community, and others – it is entirely possible that even further delay kicks in. But that doesn’t alter the broader picture. Why wouldn’t you be exploring the alternatives, when cookies cover only a fraction of one browser’s user base, which itself only represents a portion of the overall market???

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And alternative solutions to the cookie are emerging. Even if no single option can cover all of its uses, Nano’s own Intent Personas is already easing the transition to a post-cookie world in some respects. This product provides demographic targeting, but without cookies, IDs or profiling. How do we know the tech behind it is on track? Those targeting choices are cross-checked against Nano’s own panel of humans - people belonging to those same demographic groups.?

To summarise, the fate of cookies in the long-term is clear. And Chrome’s initial switch off of 1% or about 30 million users’ cookies on 4 January confirms that so far. But whether the overall switch off is delayed for a few extra months or not, the gap left in their absence is not going away either. There is no direct replacement for the cookie. And given the reasons behind its passing, there are reasons to doubt any solution promising otherwise.??

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But seeing the positive, we should find plenty more innovation around both targeting and measurement outside of the walled gardens, without the use of cookies – or other data signals which may only be disrupted further down the line.??

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As the transition to the cookieless world nears, it’s important for advertisers to accelerate partner testing and set up for success. At Nano, our unique live-intent targeting and contextual offering can help you futureproof your digital strategies and drive performance.?

Learn how we can help by booking a demo today.?