Google’s announcement Monday that it won’t kill the third-party cookie in Chrome rocked the ad industry. In the immediate aftermath, it seemed like the sword of Damocles hanging over the ecosystem had been sheathed. Certainly, marketers no longer have to wring their hands over how their digital ads will perform without cookies to power targeting and measurement.
Many advertisers were already on the journey to move away from cookies. Havas Media Network’s global EVP Jamies Seltzer, who oversees consumer analytics, said that 99% of its clients are already working to run cookieless campaigns.
But Google’s decision to keep cookies around will still have an uneven impact across the industry, according to ad industry experts. That’s already becoming apparent in the mixed reception some public adtech companies got on Wall Street.
Criteo’s stock popped 10%, shortly after Google made its announcement, while LiveRamp’s dipped about 5%. After all, many companies have spent the last four years touting technology and business practices that will subsist without the cookie.
Here are the companies that most stand to benefit and those that are most at risk, according to industry analysts and executives.
Google always wins
Google’s Privacy Sandbox tools, which were meant to replace the ad tracking and measurement functions of the cookie, had been buffeted both by government regulators who worried they were anti-competitive, and by adtech companies who claimed they didn’t work. Even marketers were unconvinced, with 69% of B2C marketers skeptical that the Privacy Sandbox was a viable cookie alternative, according to Forrester’s Q2 CMO Pulse Survey this year.
“Privacy and anti-monopoly law are entirely overlapping issues for it,” said Jason Kint, CEO of the publisher trade association Digital Content Next.
Now, Google has taken its ball out of the sandbox and gone home. In doing so it has, for now at least, silenced the persistent thrum of regulators like the U.K.-based Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which published a quarterly audit of Google’s Privacy Sandbox efforts. “Given these developments, we will not publish our planned quarterly update report at the end of this month,” the CMA said after Google announced cookies would be staying.
Google’s next move is too vague to elicit any immediate criticism, and its public statements strike a tone that’s conscientious about concerns consumers have about how their data is used. “We now believe user choice is the best path forward there,” said company CEO Sundar Pichai during Tuesday’s second-quarter earnings call.