The Death of the Third Party Cookie Creates A New Balancing Act

As users continue to demand greater privacy (transparency, choice/control over how their data is used, etc), it’s been clear for some time that the web ecosystem must evolve to meet these ever-increasing demands. In 2019, Google announced an initiative called Privacy Sandbox, a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy. This approach is envisioned to ensure that ads remain relevant for users who are willing to share their data with websites and advertisers while anonymizing aggregate user data and keeping more of it on the device rather than storing it in the cloud. Taking privacy one step further, in January 2020, Google announced plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. While some browsers have chosen to respond to their user’s privacy concerns by totally blocking third-party cookies from their gateways, these brusque measures enfeeble many ad-supported website business models, fostering the use of obscure workaround strategies such as ‘fingerprinting’, which can essentially decrease user privacy and control. Thus, Google’s plan is to schedule the phase out over a two-year period, enabling the industry to adopt a targeting and attribution solution that meets the needs of both advertisers and users in order to encourage other browsers to slacken their current stance on targeting

Leveraging innovative, creative solutions to scale their customers’ business and help them succeed in a competitive world, Google partner Zima Media is a remote, decentralized, modern ecommerce marketing agency with a mission to make smart marketing accessible to every single business. And on today’s episode of MarketScale Live, Mike Zima, Chief Growth Officer at Zima Media, chats with MarketScale’s Daniel Litwin, the Voice of B2B, to discuss what the post-third-party cookie world may look like and the impacts on established business relationships within the advertising industry.

“If they flipped it off tomorrow, it could be really bad—we wouldn’t be able to track anything,” said Zima. “It’s almost like as effective as sending out a billboard into the universe and hoping someone will find your website.”

While a giant step forward in enhancing privacy for the consumer, for the professionals in the space, however, adapting to this shift from third-party cookies is going to require these businesses to realign their marketing strategies to stay in check with new guidelines.

“From a business owner’s perspective or an ad agency’s perspective, you have to drink the Kool-Aid,” remarked Zima. “Understanding what’s available now and getting used to the next set of rules that we have to work in order to advertise our products and services online without crossing those lines—which is really building up these pillars of privacy around our own data. If anything, it’s an exciting development for the consumer.” 

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