There was a collective gasp on January 14th across the adtech and media space when Google made its announcement that it would be ending support for third-party cookies by 2022. Although to be fair, the gasp was more like a desperate sigh of inevitability, with many analysts and companies expecting the move for awhile. With Safari and Firefox pre-empting Google in 2019, the tech giant was merely playing catch-up. But Google also holds the majority of the global web browser market, so the ensuing anxiety was palpable. Many ad-tech companies will spend the next two years panicking, developing, panicking some more and trying to figure out how their main proposition can survive without third-party cookies. But at Fifty, we have built cookieless identifiers into the core of our tech stack. We welcome a future without cookies and here’s why.
Cookies are outdated
Google choosing to join Safari and Firefox in blocking third party-cookies is effectively rendering the technology obsolete. But it is high time cookies got retired anyway – they are an old form of tech that is actually removed from much of our online experience today. Think about where people are spending their time on the internet – it's through mobile, mobile, video, audio and connected TV. As browsers have become one of many routes to accessing the internet, cookies have become less relevant tools to identify consumer behaviour. Basically, it’s time we stop using third-party cookies as crutches.
Multiple data inputs = greater accuracy
Fifty’s technology stack is built off of multiple data streams, so losing third-party cookies does very little to dent how we can understand consumers. In fact, our data streams offer us nuanced insight into consumers because we are using network science to understand not only their online behaviour but their passions and beliefs – the things that motivate them and that they care about, the things that make them human.
Our platform takes billions of data points – a blend of first-party, contextual and social data – to build consumer profiles that are dynamic, bespoke and highly accurate. And because we can understand consumers’ motivations and interests, we can deliver accurate targeted advertising without reliance on third-party cookies.
People still want relevant advertising
Insights only come to life when they can truly be activated. We can build a consumer profile through analysis of large sweathes data and then execute it immediately through our platform. What this means is that consumers will get the right advertising, in the right place, at the right time. Our ability to understand consumers, across a range of devices, means that we will be able to continue to deliver highly relevant advertising. And ultimately, third-party cookies or not, that is still the way the internet is run.
Customers understand that in order to access free content online, there will be advertising. They just want more privacy, and more control over the ads that they see. They want relevance. Not another ad for a timeshare condo in Portugal. While many may be unsure of what to make of Google’s decision to end support for third-party cookies, it is doubtful that the fundamental exchange of value (and information) between internet users and publishers will end. And while Google promises to work with advertisers and publishers to create a new, more consumer-friendly system, at Fifty we don’t need to wait. We know the future of advanced consumer insights and targeting is right here.
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