First-party Cookies

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.

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, we bring together 4 stories, including the positive reception for FLEDGE, the French privacy regulator fining a game developer for leveraging IDFV (Identifier For Vendors), and the European Center for Digital Rights unifying the “dark patterns” interpretation in terms of cookie consent pop-up windows.

Google is coming for your cookies, and not the tasty kind lying safely in a tin in your kitchen, but the third-party ones that sit in your browser, watching, waiting, and storing all kinds of information. This has major implications, some good and some bad, for marketers and consumers alike. It also means that many of our old tools will soon become obsolete. However, you don’t need to crack open your tin of real cookies and start stress-eating yet. There are plenty of new tools on their way, one of which we’re going to get into today: The Protected Audience API.

Cookies play an essential role in the modern internet. These small pieces of data stored in your web browser can do everything from saving login details to enhancing website performance to helping marketers show users products that they will love. However, not all cookies are made equal, and there are significant differences between first-party and third-party cookies.

In this Media Review, we focus on the Privacy Sandbox: the status of the current Origin Trials, the progress of the tools not currently in testing, the critique for Topics from the industry, and the news from Google Marketing Live around both the Web and Android Privacy Sandbox.