3rd-party Cookies

As a new year dawns, many of us are looking toward 2023 with trepidation. A potent cocktail of skyrocketing inflation, a looming recession, and general global instability has created a difficult environment for companies in almost every industry. However, things aren’t as bad as they seem, and if companies can take advantage of the evolving MarTech trends, they can thrive despite the adversity.

It might have been delayed, but the end of third-party tracking cookies is coming at the beginning of 2025, and businesses can’t afford to keep pretending otherwise. The good news is that thanks to this delay, there is still a small window of opportunity for companies to prepare for the cookieless future by engaging with the Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox.

Have you heard of Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) yet? SDA was released at the beginning of 2022 by Project Rearc – an initiative that came to life as the IAB Tech Lab’s answer to the impending demise of 3rd-party cookies. Although a year hasn’t passed since its release, SDA has received significant attention in the press and industry conferences and is considered one of the go-to solutions for targeting when the 3rd-party cookie pond dries up.

We may still be a long way away from anything like the Replicants in Blade Runner, but artificial intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning in particular are already transforming how we approach everything from cancer screenings to displaying ads. ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have made headlines for their eerily accurate imitations of humans. The ability for ChatGPT, and AIs like it, to answer questions and even create functional (if buggy) code has created a media furor that has driven significant investment in AI-focused companies, despite shaky markets.

However, if you dig a little deeper you’ll begin to see that while ChatGPT is really cool, it is just one part of a much bigger picture. Let’s dive in and find out why.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

On April 18th, Google published the results from Google Ads’ interest-based advertising testing, where, among other tools, Topics API was analyzed. We are happy that the Google Ads team joined RTB House and Criteo in openly publishing findings from experiments with Privacy Sandbox APIs.

In the report, the Google Ads team compares the effectiveness of applying Topics API, contextual signals, and publisher first-party IDs instead of cookies for Interest-Based Advertising (IBA). Third-party cookies were allowed in this experiment for use cases unrelated to targeting, such as frequency capping and measurement.