C is for Cookie, that’s good enough for everyone.
When one-to-one marketing became a new template for how to think about advertising, and the World Wide Web became accessible to the public at nearly the same time, the age of truly targeted media appeared to be at hand.
Peppers and Rogers’, The One-To-One Future offered marketers and businesses a new way of communicating with customers, one based on more personalized, individualized customer interactions rather than broad, generalized advertising communications. They argued that businesses should focus on understanding each customer's unique needs and preferences, building detailed customer profiles, and creating tailored marketing messages to foster loyalty and long-term engagement. At almost the same time, the WWW surfaced from the backrooms of nerdery to the front rooms of the general public, quickly offering an increasingly diversified portfolio of content that could serve as proxies for increasingly segmented audiences to be targeted with greater precision than media had heretofore allowed. It’s funny now to think that Peppers and Rogers talked about data gathering and database marketing in the context of better using direct marketing, telemarketing, and the new darling at the time: the fax machine. But the accident of history put these together in the gestalt of what became Dotcom 1.0.
Yet something was still missing. The methods for targeting more refined audience segments were still essentially the same: the audience was assumptive based on content. For all the technology being developed and the new ways of thinking about customer relationships being discussed in the pages of the HBR, a way to connect advertising directly to an intended target audience was still absent.
Fresh from the oven
In 1994, at the same time the Netscape browser came online, a company programmer, Lou Montulli, created the cookie to solve the problem of identifying users across web pages and maintaining what computer-type folks call a “stateful session” in the otherwise “stateless” HTTP protocol. The first use case for cookies was to check if users had previously visited a particular website, allowing a site to “remember” you so that you didn’t re-enter the site starting from scratch. You wouldn’t have to keep typing in your password to enter a beloved site and manage the session. The cookie was a useful little piece of innocuous code that made the online user experience a meaningfully better one. It could be stored on a user's computer. The data would be sent back to the server with each subsequent request from the same browser, allowing the server to recognize users and maintain session-based information across multiple page visits, allowing you to go from page to page without the site “forgetting” you’d already been somewhere. This innovation was fundamental for creating more interactive and person-friendly web experiences, e.g., maintaining shopping cart contents during an online shopping session.
It's hard to believe now, looking back 20+ years, that it took a few years for the cookie’s potential as an advertising tool for tracking and targeting people across the web to be realized. But realize they did.
While initially designed to enhance user experience by remembering login information and preferences, cookies quickly became the cornerstone for web analytics and targeted advertising. By tracking user behavior across different websites, cookies enabled businesses to gather valuable data on user preferences and browsing habits. They enabled businesses to track user behavior online, collecting data that could ostensibly be translated into insights of interests, preferences, and purchasing habits. This data allowed for highly targeted advertising, making it possible to deliver personalized messages to the right user at the right time.
Delicious but only sometimes good for you.
However, the extensive use of cookies also raised privacy concerns. Users became increasingly aware of how their data was being collected and used, prompting calls for greater transparency and regulation. In response, laws such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) were enacted to give users more control over their data. Despite these challenges, cookies remain a fundamental component of the internet's infrastructure, essential for personalizing web experiences and driving the digital economy.
This journey I’ve take was initially precipitated by Google’s intention of depreciating and sunsetting the use of the cookie in their Chrome browser.
The cookie, destroyer of worlds
While one-to-one marketing and hyper-segmented targeting offer the promise of rendering advertising more relevant to its intended audiences, thereby derisking media buying by mitigating “waste,” the mechanics that have made it possible – i.e., cookies and the delivery systems the data they enable fuel -- can be partly blamed for increased social sectarianism. As media becomes more fragmented, advertising is increasingly segmented. Companies investing in marketing and advertising have always conceptualized their target audiences in segments. However, media that addresses more discrete groups of people means advertising can be delivered to more specific audiences. This has led to a shift from marketing products to broad audiences to targeting individuals with personalized messages.
When media and advertising are fragmented, they reinforce existing social, cultural, and ideological divisions. Instead of engaging with diverse perspectives, individuals are increasingly exposed to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs and preferences, including advertising. This echo chamber effect can deepen social divides and contribute to polarization.
Moreover, focusing on personalized marketing diminishes opportunities for shared experiences. Humming a jingle on a road trip that everyone in the car starts to sing, an advertisement’s soundtrack rendered a shared cultural expression (the movie “Demolition Man” takes this phenomenon to a chuckle-worthy height). In the past, mass marketing and mass media created common cultural touchstones that helped, not exactly, unify society, giving it a common frame of reference from which to debate reality. Today, emphasizing personalized, segmented marketing means that individuals are less likely to be exposed to the same messages and cultural references, further disintegrating the social fabric.
When media is fragmented, advertising is segmented. Not that companies investing lots of money in marketing and advertising didn’t already conceptualize their target audiences in segments. Still, media that addressed more discrete groups of people meant advertising could be delivered to more specific audiences. Products could diversify, and instead of shouting to the people from the mountaintop about them, messages could be whispered discretely in a more intimate media setting. We went from products and brands trying to persuade and connect with “people” to trying to persuade and connect with “persons.”
Instead of trying to sell a million units to an audience consisting of a million people, advertisers are now trying to sell a million items to a million audiences, each consisting of one person.
When this state persists long enough, we are no longer a pluralistic society on the same continent working to accommodate our differences as a united culture (E pluribis unum), but a collection of individuals living in a personalized media memesphere, scattered across an archipelago of islands with only the sea that separates us what is shared in common.
To see the deleterious effects of what the cookie has made possible one has to look no further than social media.