third-party cookies

Google Topics is Google’s proposed replacement, which takes us back in time to broad, interest-based segmented targeting. This means brands are about to return to the “bad old days” of marketing, when many audiences all saw the same message. And this one-message-fits-most approach doesn’t fix what’s fundamentally broken in MADTech: the consumer experience, writes Tara DeZao, director of product marketing, MarTech and AdTech, at Pega.

Clean rooms are riding a wave of momentum as the ad industry looks for ways to use aggregated, anonymized data sets to predict audience identity. Yet, despite a catchy name, clean rooms aren’t necessarily as “clean” as they promise to be, writes Drew Stein, CEO of Audigent.

While Chrome dallies on the third-party cookie question, Firefox keeps releasing new anti-tracking features. Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s chief security officer, dishes on everything from cracking down on fingerprinting to its unlikely collaboration with Meta on privacy-preserving attribution technology.

The expiration date for third-party cookies has been extended for another year. We talk through what the delay will mean for ad tech. Plus, an entire corner of the LUMAscape now exists within the Tremor-Amobee deal, the ultimate example in ad tech consolidation.

We read between the lines of Google’s progress report to the UK’s antitrust regulator on its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome. Could Google miss its own self-imposed 2023 deadline? “Signs point to yes.”

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

The word “cookieless” crops up in virtually every conversation about the future of online identity. But what exactly do people mean when they say “cookieless”? Although the definition seems simple enough – the absence of cookies – it lacks the nuance to encompass the true complexity of signal loss. It’s also a misnomer.

As brands build out their first-party data strategies and work to assemble post-cookie capabilities, many are “in-housing” to remain in control of their data. But to ensure success, they need to accomplish a few important tasks, writes Nancy Marzouk, CEO of MediaWallah.

Criteo is still using third-party cookies while it can. Why not? But “if tomorrow we don’t have access to them, then we’ll have to use something else,” said CEO Megan Clarken. What sort of “something else?” Criteo has been testing what it refers to as “more privacy-enabled, controllable and reliable signals.”

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