This is how the cookie finally crumbles

On the 4th of January it began. Google started its long-awaited, oft-feared sunsetting of the 3rd party cookie. The first phase begins with shutting down cookies across about 1% of users, or approximately 30 million Chromers.

In January 2020 B.C (before Covid), Google announced that in 2-years, they were going to sunset the 3rd-party cookie in its Chrome browser.

This announcement got a lot of attention in the advertising industry. While Safari and Firefox had already committed to a default of blocking 3rd party cookies, keeping the cookie out of Chrome was a huge call. It is the world’s most used web browser, holding a hair under 65% global penetration. That’s a vast amount of digital activity to render untrackable and a considerable population made untargetable by one company’s decision.

The obligatory columns and comments in trades and at conferences – as much as there were in the brief period before the COVID quarantines – were written and made about the need for better privacy protection and targeting techniques. The call for more sound personal data controls and less invasive targeting methods had been made before. It’s been made repeatedly over the years whenever there is a data breach or a corporate violation of our collective trust. Remember Cambridge Analytica, for example? But Google’s move meant things were going to have to change.

At the time of their announcement, Google did offer some hope to the millions of organisms that live off the Great Google Barrier Reef in terms of tracking and targeting. Google said it was exploring alternative technologies that would enable a level of tracking and targeting that are less invasive by being less user-specific but would continue to allow the rest of the ecosystem to have a modicum of anonymous tracking so advertisers can still know if their ads are working. They first offered FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). This proposal involved grouping users with similar browsing habits into "cohorts" without revealing individual identities. Advertisers could then target ads to these cohorts. However, FLoC faced criticism for potential privacy risks, “cohorts” essentially being bigger if blander cookies. and was ultimately abandoned by Google.

Fast forward a year and a couple of months, and Google’s David Temkin said Google didn’t plan on developing or using alternative identifiers after all.

The reaction wasn’t the rending of garments or gnashing of teeth by the unrighteous. But eyebrows the size of Eugene Levy’s were raised. Google’s Privacy Sandbox was eventually established as a way for media owners and advertisers to still reap the benefits of precise targeting through audience data gleaned and aggregated in myriad ways yet to be explored.

This move has meant significant changes in how the digital universe is monitored and how that translates into cross-channel targeting. Before the end of the cookie era, a lot of effort – or at least a lot of the illusion of effort, anyway – has been put toward things like data clean rooms, “Trust Tokens,” and TopicsAPI (an approach tailored to preserving user privacy while maintaining informational relevance, the proposed system could facilitate the sharing of overarching interest themes of users, sans the disclosure of their specific website visitations). 

Google’s decision doesn’t mean that the rest of the industry has to do without its own form of identification of target audiences. Still, it does mean a huge part of space becomes increasingly opaque to everyone EXCEPT Google.

A few observations, in no particular order:

• With original Search and YouTube, Google owns the world’s search market.

• Google has user data on a vast array of people’s behavior, and the entry point for that behavior is under search and YouTube.

• DV 360 supports 30-40 % of the adserving market, representing over 80% of display and between 15-30% of video. If more video goes programmatic, that share will grow.

• Google has often been the invisible, and sometimes not so invisible hand, of privacy policy development. GDPR and CCPA were shaped in part by Google.

• Google’s mobile operating system hovers just over 70% globally and 57% in the US.

• Google’s Smart and connected TV operating system is officially somewhere between 10 and 15%, but unofficially over 20%.

• Chrome has a hair under 65% global penetration, with just over 50% in North America.

• All media is moving to be connected to an IP, which means it’s connected to a machine-readable ecosystem.

• The endpoints of the ecosystem are devices.

• The devices all have IDs.

• The devices are running Google’s OS.

• Google has optics on the entire media universe, including the universe’s most extensive ID graph, that reads across every major media.

Even if a closed garden, the garden is so large you’ll never see the walls. It’ll be like that village in that crappy M. Night Shyamalan movie.

So what’s happening here? Has Google decided this to enhance its image as a good corporate citizen? To ante up on the initial “don’t be evil” ethos the company advocated? To proactively comply with the growing number of regulations governments seek to impose on using personal data? Or maybe Google has come to the conclusion that they can use the vast oceans of data collected everyday for years, along with the oceans of data they collect every day from today into eternity, to identify audiences consisting of actual humans, cleanse it, normalize it, structure it, and model it, to level the most complete targeting apparatus known to advertising-kind at the entire mediaverse.

Next week, why All Your Base Might Belong to Google…

#DigitalMarketing #PrivacyPolicy #GoogleAnalytics #AdTech #DataPrivacy #OnlineAdvertising #MarketingStrategy #CookielessFuture #InternetPrivacy #TargetedAdvertising #BrowserTechnology