Privacy Sandbox

Marketers are being proactive in advance of the demise of third-party cookies but challenges, as well as opportunities, remain.

Change is constant in digital marketing but 2022 looks set to be a year where landmark shifts, including ID-less advertising and contextual targeting, will be formed. Three of RTB House’s in-house experts predict the huge changes on the horizon.

Google proposed that instead of deprecating third-party cookies for all users in Chrome, they will let users decide whether to allow third-party cookies in the browser. Google also emphasized their continued investment in the Privacy Sandbox to ensure its performance and utility.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

In this edition of the Cookieless Newsroom, we highlight Microsoft’s deployment of the Ad Selection API in its Edge browser, a tool similar to Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API. We also cover a recent academic study demonstrating the suitability of the Protected Audience API for retargeting. Additionally, we report on a landmark European regulatory fine imposed on Google’s MarTech division.

In January 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, June 2022 brought yet another extension to the 2nd half of 2024, and in April 2024 it was postponed to the beginning of 2025. Moreover, Google Chrome declared withdrawing 1% of 3rd-party cookies in Q1 2024 to provide a reliable environment for testing.

Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share. Therefore—how will retargeting work without cookies?