By: Yves-Michel GABAY, Managing Director MEA of Gamned!

Let’s start with the definition of cookies and what they’re used for

Yves-Michel GABAY, Managing Director MEA at Gamned!

A cookie is a text file stocked in a browser that eases the way to surf online by recording several pieces of information. The cookie is composed of a unique identifier acting as a label. 

It is essential to ensure a user can surf from one page to another in good conditions.

It is useful for audience measurement purposes. Those cookies only generate anonymized statistics about the number of visitors on a website and records their behavior

Cookies are used for analyzing surfing behaviors all over the web and then enhance targeting capabilities and performances measurement.

Cookies can have different expiry dates:

Session cookies: These cookies expire right after your browser is closed. They are only useful to ensure the information is correctly passed while surfing from a page to another. 

Persistent cookies: These cookies remain active and keep records after closing the browser for up to 13 consecutive months. They ensure that a website you just visited is running correctly. They are meant to record display preferences, language, etc.

Cookies can belong to different domains:

First Party Cookies, which are hosted in the browser and are only accessible on the visited domain. These cookies cannot be shared with other partners

Third-party cookies, which allow 3rd party companies to gather information around the behavior and interest of online users for advertising purposes.

So why are cookies used in digital marketing?

To target
Cookies allow you to create cookie pools based on interest, intent and socio demo criteria. These pools are useful to run digital activations like (re)targeting, look alike or even exclusion

To optimize
Cookies allow to optimize at 2 different levels:

  • At the user level, it offers a cross publisher/channel tracking and managing the frequency capping, bidding strategy and more
  • At the environment level, optimization on context, site, placement, format, etc.

To measure
Cookies allow to run single and multi-touch attribution analysis, as well as audience measurement, and report on different KPIs (impressions, clicks, viewability and more)

After this long but necessary introduction we must understand why cookies are more and more challenged.

In 2020 Google Chrome announced that they will drop third party cookies in 2022. This was predictable because since 2010 we started to witness a push back on digital advertising when adblockers first appeared.

Then in 2017 Apple started blocking cookies on Safari followed by Mozilla – Firefox in 2019 (altogether = 23% of the browsing market). In the meantime, on the regulatory front, GDPR came to life in 2018, and in 2020 CPCA arrived in the US to better protect internet users ‘privacy.

In parallel we must agree that cookies were not perfect as identifiers (communication issue and latency, Brower centric – impossible to track users across devices) and are not the most adapted tool for today’s marketing ecosystem.

So the third party cookies disappearance is provoked more by the internet users ‘behavior than the publishers or search engines. 

But do not fear a post cookie apocalypse because even if Google Chrome drops the 3rd party cookies it will accelerate the seek for alternative solutions.

Today 3 solutions are emerging:

  • The one-to-one targeting through identifiers with 3 variants
    • Simple Identifier: An identifier devel-ped by a company for its own interest like FB, Google, Amazon
    • Mutualized Identifier: Publishers ‘identifying system mutualization, like Okta, Passmedia, NetID
    • Identity Platforms: Reproduce the exact same ecosystem that of the cookie’s by using another one like unified ID solution, ID5, Zeotap, LiveRamp
  • Cohort targeting
    The Privacy sandbox proposed by Google (involving external partners) in which we can find FLoC.
    An end-to-end Google targeting system from ONE-TO-ONE to ONE-TO-FEW, based on a learning algorithm aggregating users having the same surfing behavior

With at least 5,000 users per cohort to ensure that one to one tracking is impossible

These cohorts are available in a catalogue where marketers can choose the most adapted one.

  • Going back to Contextual Targeting
    It is not the most advanced feature in digital marketing though it still exists. Companies that are currently specialized in Contextual Targeting propose more and more agile and accurate context analysis algorithms.

This solution is 100% privacy safe and can be very relevant for advertisers focusing on branding.

In conclusion, the end of the cookie’s era is not a catastrophe, but rather an opportunity to evolve and find new solutions that could solve many issues (privacy, legal, latency …) 

Advertisers and agencies must become more agnostic (as we are at Gamned!).

Once these alternatives are live and ready, they will be able to pick the most relevant one according to their or client’s objective. But it could also be an opportunity for the advertisers to rethink their overall Digital media communication strategy to match the consumer aspirations.