With Google’s announcement that, just kidding, we’re not actually going to deprecate cookies, we have seen industry responses ranging from celebration (“we’re saved!”), to anger (“do you have any idea how much time I spent writing POVs on this?”), to despair (“I can’t believe I wasted all that time on money on building solutions for the promised cookieless future!”), and plenty of mixes of the above.
Important parts of the modern digital media mix have already deprecated cookies, have deprioritized them in their strategy — or never incorporated them in the first place! In addition to browsers like Safari and Firefox (~20% of browser market last I checked), CTV, mobile, and Retail Media Networks are major and growing parts of the modern media mix that are cookieless or cookie-second environments. That isn’t changing with Google’s announcement.
I think it’s important to understand this update in the context of both the competitive concerns raised by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) about Privacy Sandbox — which prompted the delay of 3P cookie deprecation Google announced in April — as well as the precedent set by Apple with the iOS App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework.
As AdExchanger reported following Google’s announcement in April, “publishers and ad tech companies prompted the CMA to investigate concerns that the Privacy Sandbox self-preferences the market position of Google’s ad products, especially Google Ad Manager.” However, Chris Jenkins, director of the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit, also said in March that, “We were very clear from the start. We don’t want to stand in the way of privacy-protecting changes.”
So, what might be a nifty workaround to get Google out of the competitive hot seat while still delivering on regulators’ goals of better protecting user privacy? Do what Apple did with ATT and let users do the deprecating for you!
Will that two-step work? It’s too early to tell, but it’s plausible. It could complicate things that Google’s brand on privacy isn’t nearly as strong as Apple’s, but at least there is a somewhat analogous precedent. It’s a virtual certainty that putting the decision to allow cookies or not in users' hands will have at least some impact.
Answering the question of “how much?” means getting into another big question:What will the opt-out experience for Chrome users look like?If we use the ATT rollout as a model, we know that how the choice is framed for users in both language and execution will make a big difference in opt-out rates.
As has been written about widely, including in this week’s Marketecture Medianewsletter, Apple put very different rules in place about the language app developers could use vs. how Apple described its own application of user data: “Ask App Not To Track” for developers vs. “Personalized Ads” in a buried iOS toggle for Apple. While it’s hard to find concrete numbers I'd trust — and it varies from app to app — the directional data I’ve seen points to 70% of iOS traffic not having IDFA. All I've read indicates a much more modest impact for Apple’s own tracking, with its softer language and big money, privacy-focused ad campaigns.
So how will Google handle this? At this point we don’t know. The blog post was pretty light on details and, at least today, reasonable folks can disagree. In Marketecture’s emergency pod(!) — lot of those going around this week — Andrew Casale put a stake in the ground for a site-by-site approval based on the iOS precedent while Paul Bannister bet on a more blanket (and more cookie-friendly) approach reminiscent of Google’s rollout of the Chrome Topics API opt-out.