The current business model of the Internet is based on third-party cookies. Now the online advertising industry will have to adapt to the end of tracking with the help of cookies. This will give way to a great challenge: a new era in the digital marketing strategy of brands and advertisers.
Within the framework of the DMEXCO digital economy fair in Cologne, Matt Brittin, the president of Google in the EMEA region, assured that Chrome, the browser of the Mountain View company, will definitely stop supporting third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. That date will be absolutely irrevocable according to Google.
The transition to a world without third-party cookies will mean that the technology on which much of the online advertising system is based must be reconsidered. For this reason, new solutions will have to be developed that focus on data protection.
Third-party cookies are a technology that is being abused more and more
A cookie is understood as the small piece of data that is sent from the website you are visiting to the internet browser you are using. In a sense, this data allows the website and your browser to communicate with each other and share information. Cookies were introduced to the Internet by software engineers in the mid-1990s, and they were designed to help websites remember things like a customer’s username and password or what’s in their shopping basket. This allows a user to be identified through browsing sessions by storing their preferences. For years, third-party cookies have been widely used in marketing campaigns, as they allow us to understand consumer behavior or measure the success of campaigns.
“Third-party cookies are a technology that is being abused more and more,” Brittin told the German Press Agency. Internet users find many of the ads annoying and intrusive and therefore opt for ad blockers.
Ad blockers make it very difficult to monetize content on the web because everything is blocked.
The president of Google in EMEA rejects the total veto of personalized advertising, as it could jeopardize websites that bet on free content and finance themselves through advertising. An IAB study found that the switch from personalized advertising to non-personalized advertising could cost the digital industry €39 billion a year.
Topics, alternative to cookies
An alternative concept is topicswhich Google is currently working on and under which browsers create user profiles based on their interests without transferring data to advertisers that can facilitate the identification of the Internet user. Thus, they do not have to transmit data to advertisers.
At DMEXCO in Cologne, Google presented two new tools to bet on online advertising that respects data protection. The Google Ads Privacy Hub It is designed to help advertisers understand new advertising solutions aimed at protecting user personal data. The second tool is aimed at users: My Ads Center aims to give users more control over the ads they want to see on YouTube, Google search and Discover. In this section you can choose which ads you want to see and which ones you don’t.