With Chrome’s cookie days numbered, what’s next for targeting?

By Alya Kubati, insights research lead at Nano Interactive

The introduction of GDPR in 2018 generated a flood of last minute activity to ‘catch up’ and comply with the new law. Ditto Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in 2021, which left an 11 figure hole in Meta’s revenues.

Now just imagine the deadline in each of those cases had been pushed back on two occasions to give people an added false sense of security.

And let’s say we weren’t talking about making in-app advertising opt-in, but the removal of the cornerstone of media measurement and targeting instead. That is exactly what we’re facing with Google, Chrome and the third-party cookie. After a couple of delays, Google has finally confirmed it really will be phasing them out next year. No backing out this time.

With universal usage, it’s obvious the Chrome cookie crumble will lead to uncertainty and confusion. But the extent of that is still to be seen. One study from Adobe showed that as many as three-quarters of marketers were still “heavily” reliant on third-party cookies, with 64% even saying they planned to increase their reliance on them in the coming year. By one calculation, $1.5tn could be wiped off the value of brands who continue to rely on cookie tracking in Chrome.

“Hitting the snooze button”

An AdExchanger piece covering post-cookie preparedness speaks of businesses “hitting the snooze button”, of “lackadaisical” approaches, and not because they’re not aware or concerned.

According to Ana Milicevic, a principal at Sparrow Advisers, the reasons are far more prosaic:

“[It’s] 98% about figuring out which team in your org is tasked with actually implementing this and which budget line that comes from... Orchestration is challenging when you have quarterly targets and you still have to keep making money somehow.”

How do you find the budget for an unprecedented change, especially where the exact financial impact - as with ATT before it – can't be added to a spreadsheet. And as cookie shut-off grows closer, potentially so does the inertia. If it’s such an insurmountable task, after all – where do you even start?

Inaction also makes a little more sense when you consider the number of companies pitching what’s next in cross-site tracking. And that includes everything from a whole Lumascape of post-cookie, but cookie-like identity solutions, based on email or even fingerprinting, to alternatives like Nano, which look outside of profiling – to intent and context instead.

For many, as the number of IDs in the market increases, the less clear the right course of action is. Let’s not forget that these solutions potentially also compete with Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals, who have spoken out against their methods in the past – including the use of email as an identifier. While Sandbox will only function within Chrome, and not other browsers, will we see the tech giants clamp down on other identity solutions in future, as they have with cookies, and rinse and repeat?

Practical responses

Perhaps if tech were focused more on clear, simple solutions - and practical responses to the cookie crisis, we would be in different shape. For Nano’s part, it has taken one of the core tactics of advertising - demographic targeting - and tried to rejuvenate it in the face of cookie loss. All so that buyers aren’t forced to completely reinvent themselves over a one year transition period.

As a sector, we have gone from proxies for audience (magazine vertical, TV rating points) to directly targeting demographics via cookies – even if some doubted their accuracy. And now, as signal loss kicks in, we shift back to proxies again for intent – attention, sentiment, content and context – even if these signals are now live in a way neither the print nor cookie ones ever were.

But cookie-based audiences were arguably also limited by their own assumptions of what an audience for a given sector or product looked like. This was compounded by the fact that there was no ‘real world’ verification model to correct or back those assumptions up. Our own offering, Intent Personas, has resolved this conundrum with the use of panels continually verifying all audience targeting settings.

All without any reliance on cookies, or other IDs. And steering clear of any type of profiling or people-based data. Nano has created what it hopes is a rare solution that will ease the transition to a post-cookie landscape, without buyers having to radically alter the way they work. It may even - whisper it - work better than cookie-led demographic targeting, which we’ve all become so reliant upon.