It's been over three years since Google first mentioned they were tossing their Cookies and with this recent announcement they are going to "stop trying to make a cookie-less future happen".
We have seen a polarising response from the marketing industry. Whether it be a celebration (“we’re saved!”), to anger (“do you have any idea how much time I spent writing POVs on this?”), to despair (“I can’t believe I wasted all that time on money on building solutions for the promised cookieless future!”).
But to you and me, which one of these answers is the right one?
How many of us have been guilty of just blindly clicking the accept button anytime we are online when the pop up box hits us? 40% of us do exactly that, when only 18% do the opposite and look into and reject those cookies. Cookies play a huge part in how everyday people like you and me use the internet on a daily basis, there’s a huge knowledge gap surrounding what cookies are and what they do, and as any brand manager knows, users are less likely to accept something they do not understand.
But the statistics show that there is a large proportion of users that blindly accept the cookie and this fuels the data machine that is highly monetised. However, important parts of the modern digital marketing mix have already deprecated cookies and have deprioritised them in their strategy or never incorporated them in the first place. In addition to this, browsers like Safari and Firefox, mobile, and retail media networks are major growing areas of the modern media mix that are cookieless or cookie-second environments. That isn’t changing with Google’s announcement.
While we don’t have sufficient detail to say much for sure about the future, we know enough to assume that the impact will still be something more than nil.
Just a reminder that brands need to look beyond the realms of cookies if they want to find ways of reaching customers in the way customers want to be reached. Not everyone hates ads, they just hate ads that aren’t relevant to them or spam them with wild frequency.
Using the right combination of design and strategy means that your customers will have relevant and targeted ads in front of them at every touch point.