In ending its plan to stop passing cookies in Chrome, Google has hit the reset button, taking some of the immediate pressure off itself, while still marching the industry towards cookie deprecation by another means.
The Trade Desk, Criteo, and LiveRamp will suffer short-term setbacks
Adtech companies that spent years investing in their cookieless infrastructure, like The Trade Desk, Criteo, and LiveRamp, will see setbacks as immediate demand for those tools declines, said Dan Salmon, a partner at New Street Research.
The Trade Desk had been brandishing an email-based cookie replacement technology called Unified ID 2.0. But widescale adoption, with third-party cookies remaining, is sluggish. If it caught on, it would have given The Trade Desk a real base of authenticated, logged-in users—the holy grail for companies collecting online audiences. But now there’s less urgency for its use, said Salmon. “They could have won share,” he said.
Likewise, the persistence of cookies is a negative for LiveRamp, which had built a new generation of identity tools without cookies, Salmon said, noting that there’s not going to be a lot of urgency to adopt those toolsets in the near term.
“They are short-term losers,” said John Donahue, partner at programmatic consultancy Up and to the Right. However, he and others believe the identity solutions these companies have been developing, which require consumer consent, will be valuable over time as consumers demand more control over how their data is used.
Tom Triscari, CEO of tech research firm Lemonade Projects, still sees a bright future in companies that offer ID solutions. “I’m a glass half full on them,” he said. “The alternative ID is still the future.”
Publishers that invested in cookieless solutions have already lost time and might lose more money
Publishers that have moved away entirely from relying on third-party cookies to power their ads will see a revenue hit and might have to revert back to cookie solutions, as marketers re-focus spend on cookie-based solutions, said Ilhan Zengin, CEO and founder at publisher adtech firm ShowHeroes.
Those publishers are weary with Google’s repeated pivots, said Joe Root, cofounder at adtech platform Permutive. “Google changing its mind again messes with their strategies and makes it harder to run their business,” said Root. “It creates chaos.”
But like alternative ID solutions, cookieless solutions will still ultimately be the most valuable and sustainable way for publishers to drive revenue in the future.
“No one should take a false sense of security at this news,” said founder of consultancy Messer Media. “The only sure way to lose here is by retreating from your diversification plans.”
User privacy is still a big loser
The cookie had problems—it wasn’t the most accurate, it wasn’t particularly privacy safe, but it definitely helped advertisers buy scaled audiences across the open web. There’s value in that for some advertisers, even if it leads to opacity and bad practices.
The continuation of cookies in Chrome will enable that to continue. Anticipating this, U.K. data watchdog The Information Comissioner’s Office is “disappointed” with Google’s move, encouraging the industry to “not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking.”