How Marketers Can Prepare for a Cookie-less Future

News pertaining to the coronavirus has taken center stage over the past few months—and rightly so. The marketing industry has had to adjust to new, unforeseen business realities, pivot programs to account for digital-only distribution and communications, shift advertising budgets and more. But in the meantime, other topics that require planning and new strategies should remain on marketers’ radar.

Successfully transitioning to a cookie-less web is one of them, according to a piece in AdExchanger. Google Chrome announced earlier this year that it’s phasing out third-party cookies within two years. And despite the struggles that companies have experienced due to COVID-19, Google isn’t showing any signs of extending that timeline. Andrew Sandoval, Director of Biddable Media at The Media Kitchen, suggests that marketers should be monitoring three critical areas in order to make the transition.

The first is examining how different browsers’ approach to privacy and cookies. Since Safari and Firefox have already blocked third-party cookies by default, Sandoval suggests that marketers can prepare for Chrome’s upcoming policy by testing and learning from Safari campaigns as much as possible.

Second, he suggests watching the data clean room products being produced by the walled gardens—Facebook, Google and Amazon—that allow for the combination of first-party data sets with those companies’ data. They have the potential to help marketers solve the measurement and privacy issues arising from the lack of third-party cookies.

Lastly, Sandoval suggests marketers consider alternatives to attribution that don’t rely on cookies, which may result in more of a reliance on A/B testing, matched-market testing or media-mix modeling. For a deep dive into how marketers can plan for a cookie-less future, read more in AdExchanger.