3rd-party Cookies

The end of third-party tracking cookies is on the horizon, but it’s not as bad as you might think. Despite concerns from some advertisers that losing third-party cookies will make it impossible to deliver personalized advertising, there are already a number of effective solutions in the works to ensure that users can still enjoy relevant ads, without any privacy fears.

Let’s take a quick dive into why third-party tracking cookies are being retired, what that means for your advertising strategy, and why it’s actually a good thing for both customers and advertisers.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

In this media review, you can find out more about the latest Google announcements concerning the 3rd-party cookie phase out being postponed until 2024 [Note: In April 2024, it was further postponed until early 2025] and the tests expansion for the Privacy Sandbox for the Web, the news connected with Google’s Origin Trials and Topics API, as well as the reboot to the EU’s digital rulebook by the European parliament—DSA and DMA.

It doesn’t matter how good your adverts are if you can’t find people who want to connect with your brand. Even iconic brands struggle to get seen in a sea of choices, and the key to success in modern marketing is finding the right audience through targeted advertising. This term is broad, so let’s take a look at what targeted advertising is, how it works, and how you can use it to make your advertising campaigns more effective.

In this Media Review, we describe the most important findings from the 2022 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the status of Google’s preparations for disabling third-party cookies, Apple’s updates in its SKAdNetwork documentation that change the game for mobile ad-tech, and more.

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.