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Over-Cooked: Data experts share their insights into viable alternatives to the 3rd party cookie

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By Gillian West, Social media manager

April 23, 2014 | 4 min read

The third party cookie was once the undisputed king of display advertising but as consumers become increasingly mobile and savvy brands are trying to target consumer across multiple channels, the cookie has been unable to keep up with the pace of change.

In the latest issue of The Drum we explore how the cookie has begun to crumble and the contributing factors to its demise.

Here a selection of data experts share their thoughts on what a viable alternative to third party cookies would need to have to satisfy both consumer and marketer needs.

Gareth Shaw – commercial director, PulsePoint

If you take a step back and look at the advertising industry, in particular digital, there is a lot of talk about programmatic, RTB and machines starting to take over. Any alternative to the cookie will need the ability to have consistency and also liquidity.Spot buys are a thing of the past, they’re inefficient and programmatic will stop being a buzzword and just become the mechanism used. The alternative to the cookie will need to work in display and in mobile and then in video and connected TV and potentially digital outdoor and any other digital channels that come into fruition in the next few years. As well as being consistent across all channels it also needs that liquidity to be able to exist across the entire programmatic ecosystem because whether it’s mobile, social or connected TV the user isn’t thinking about the best way to get the best ad experience, they just want to consume content. All of our future ad experiences should sing off the same hymn sheet, to do that an underlying consistency and liquidity needs to underpin the whole industry.

Ian Liddicoat – chief information officer, ZenithOptimedia

From a media perspective we want to optimise all activity that we undertake, the most comprehensive tracking mechanism that we can have in place across all devices would be a good thing, and I say that not just from a selfish media agency point of view. A new cookie alternative should make advertising more relevant to the consumer, rather than interrupting, that is what we hoped cookies would provide and they have done to some extent. What we need to do now is address the cross device issue and drive up the degree of relevance. A viable alternative will also need to nail the privacy side of things and there are a lot of different elements here. There has to be a strong mechanism to allow the consumer to engage or not, more control needs to be put in the hands of the consumer this time.

Omer Artun – CEO, AgilOne

There are really only a couple of options as alternatives to the cookie and the most prominent one that people are talking about is device fingerprinting. Third party cookies are dismissed all the time and not allowed, but device fingerprinting happens when the browser loads the page. When this happens you can ask the browser a bunch of things like what plugins are being used, the time zone it is in, etc. and the browser then answers those questions back as you display the content. If you think about all the questions you could ask and the answers given it is most likely to be the same device if it browses from a similar IP number, people are unlikely to change their configuration every day or so. This information will then stay the same for a relatively long period of time identifying the user. If there is a server pixel it will pick up that information and infer it’s the same customer, so you have a way of identifying that customer and when they look at something else the browser will know it’s the same person from before. The full feature on the future of the cookie can be found in the 16 April issue of The Drum which is available for purchase from The Drum Store.
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