3rd-party Cookies

The digital marketing landscape is a very complex environment. There are many players with different profiles of activities addressing the diverse needs of their clients.

Over the past two years, the entire advertising industry has been lively discussing the impending deprecation of third-party cookies and its implications for each side of the ecosystem. There are countless articles outlining the general concept of Google’s Privacy Sandbox and its alternatives, as well as assumptions on what will happen to the industry as a whole. However, when it comes to frequency capping – one of the most important tools for both publishers and advertisers, and arguably the least controversial one privacy-wise – there is not enough media coverage, apart from some calls to address the topic.

In 2023 Google announced the depreciation of third-party cookies and began the development of the Google Privacy Sandbox. However, the deadline has once again been pushed back, this time to 2025]. The reason? “The need for more time to evaluate and test the new technologies.” Despite positive developments, RTB House’s own tests of the FLEDGE proposal, with nearly 8 million ads in 50 countries, have shown that there is still plenty of work to be done to build effective cookieless alternatives.

As Chrome plans the deprecation of third-party cookies for early 2025, and the deadline is fast approaching, the AdTech ecosystem is in pressing need of a detailed plan of how the phase-out of third-party cookies will look. A clear schedule will help ensure efficient planning and coordination, allowing for a smooth transition to a stable, vibrant ad ecosystem based on Privacy Sandbox. To help achieve this clarity—and to initiate a wider discussion—in this blog post, we will propose what we believe is a viable next step after the 1% deprecation.

Google has released an article announcing the availability of Bidding and Auction services in the web version of FLEDGE, as well as the status on pending FLEDGE capabilities. These two Google releases could have a major impact on the adoption of FLEDGE in the near future.