It’s crunch time for third-party cookies.

The only thing we’ve talked about more than Taylor and Travis in the past few years? Google Chrome phasing out cookies by the end of the year (oops, make that 2025ish per Google’s latest announcement). Marketers will be left peering into an empty jar that once rattled with the sweet sound of browsing behavior and user data. It’s not been called the “cookie apocalypse” for nothing; marketers’ ability to personalize interactions at an individual level – which people expect – feels imperiled.

And that’s not all. Cookie deprecation has implications for trying to successfully reach new audiences, recognizing them across sites, and delivering relevant experiences that will nurture them toward conversion. Not to mention measuring the effectiveness of those endeavors. 

So there’s lots at stake – for acquiring, growing, and retaining customer relationships – and you’re almost out of time to get your business prepared. Here’s why you really can’t afford to do nothing.

What’s at risk for marketers from cookie deprecation?

Cookies have helped marketers understand more about what their customers are interested in and in the market for. Your brand’s first-party data is incredibly valuable. But some things are hard to glean simply from your direct customer interactions, so if you rely on first-party data alone you’ll be left with gaps in your customer understanding. It then becomes challenging to uncover characteristic patterns and transform them into look-alike or adjacent prospects to grow your audience.

Reaching people who are in the market depends on additional insights. These might ordinarily come from third-party cookie data about competitors they’ve browsed or purchased from. Without these insights, marketing strategies can quickly devolve into what we call “spray and pray”: casting the net far and wide in the hope that it reaches at least some of the right people.

In our recent From Cookies to People webinar, Dustin Raney, our Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation, explained:  

“Enriched customer profiles, incorporating demographic and behavioral insights [… are] critical for tailoring customer experiences and optimizing audience segmentation and media strategies. Ultimately this streamlined strategy leads to more effective audience creation, impactful messaging, and increased conversions, driving ROI – all without cookies.”

Even when you’ve broadened and established your audience, you then have to be able to reach them where they are. Third-party cookies have clued you in on their most common platforms, devices, and channels. Without cookies, your strategy could lack a way of putting your marketing activity in front of high-value customers.

The biggest causes for concern:

• Retargeting – in a cookieless world can you continue to remind customers about products or services in which they’ve expressed an interest?
• And what about personalization – another indispensable tool in marketers’ arsenals, since a tailored customer experience has become a must-have rather than a nice-to-have? 
• Finally, how will you measure the effectiveness of all these efforts? You need to optimize marketing campaigns and continue honing those strategies with visibility into who you’re connecting with, converting, and how. 

What can marketers gain by adapting to cookie deprecation?

“Apocalypse” is a dramatic word, as there are actually benefits to leaving third-party cookies behind. Acting now isn’t just in the interest of not being left high and dry when cookie data disappears; there are opportunities for efficiency and simplifying your tech stack.

Those efficiencies derive largely from eliminating many of the intermediaries involved in the adtech ecosystem. Moving away from third-party cookies makes you (mercifully) less reliant on the conventional data exchange between publishers, onboarders, and data management platforms.

Speaking at the From Cookies to People webinar, Sandeep Gadre, Acxiom’s Senior Director of Identity Products, explored that data exchange: 

“That complex [digital marketing] ecosystem runs on the cookie backbone. All those different intermediaries use cookies as the connective tissue to transfer the understanding of a user from one website to another as a user goes about their internet browsing online.”

Connecting and enhancing your data sources to cover those cookie-shaped gaps will support identity resolution by helping you create a unified customer view across all platforms and devices. Building out and using trusted alternative data sources more rigorously will improve list match rates and lookalike capabilities, helping you reach customers seamlessly across a wider range of channels.

The cookieless pivot will open up the possibility of using technologies including AI for predictive modeling and advanced analytics. This elevates your ability to both better understand and grow your audience by supplementing your customer insights and making it easier to find similar groups. Avoiding these technologies only leaves you lagging behind your competitors in an increasingly tech-centric marketing landscape.

And we shouldn’t forget, of course, that the incentive behind cookie deprecation is enhanced consumer privacy. As you take control of identity and the relationship with your customers, you’ll be marketing to them more ethically and securely, all while offering them greater assurance that their data is only being used in ways that will benefit them.

So, that’s the context that makes it imperative to act now. Next, you’ll want to know the alternative strategies for success in a post-cookie world. Download our guide, “Cookie Loss Just Got Real,” to find out what they are.