Cookies have been the backbone of the digital marketing industry for a very long time. The cookie was intended to improve everyone’s day-to-day experience browsing the web, such as remembering passwords, what users add to carts etc. Due to growing privacy restrictions on the web, on March 3rd, 2021 Google announced that Chrome will deprecate (disable) 3rd party cookies. There’s a minimum 150 bn big online advertising business relying now on 3rd party cookies. So this will disrupt the digital marketing industry forever, with vast restrictions on current capabilities in targeting, tracking and real-time personalization.

In 1994 the “cookie” was born for quite a simple reason, which differs vastly from it’s capabilities now. When it was created it’s intention was to allow for the automation of logging into websites by remembering the users who had and their login details to improve user experience as well as make online shopping easier by adding the option to add things to a cart, or to remember what was added to the cart.

Again, what is the “cookie”?
A small text file which is sent from the website you are visiting to your browser. Your browser then processes and stores this file. These text files (cookies) help websites remember information about your visit. They also monitor your information and send this back to the website from your device the next time you visit.
This might sound alarming, but cookies can be helpful, and are generally easy to find and delete—if needed.

First-party cookies – created once you visit a website, the website host creates a cookie that is intended to improve and streamline your experience while browsing said website. These cookies contain information such as your IP address and the data you enter in the website. These cookies are not shared with anyone and are only accessible by the website host (owner).

Second-party cookies are first-party cookies with the difference that those are sold/transferred from website A to website B for ad targeting, usually done through a data partnership/alliance.

Third-party cookies are a whole different entity, they are looked upon as “unnecessary cookies” due to privacy laws. Their main functions are retargeting, ad serving and tracking. These cookies track you across the whole web and gather pieces of information about you and then stitch them together to assist advertisers in trying to personalize ads just for you.

DSP, DMP, SSP, RTB are all very important terms in digital marketing. They all revolve around cookies and RTB (Real-time bidding). All of these terms are widely used in Programmatic. Again, Programmatic is automated media buying based on an auction house bidding buying model. You set the price that you want to pay and if it is high enough – you win the corresponding ad slot and your ad is automatically placed and shown to the user who is in within your target audience.A DSP (demand-side platform) is used for buying ad inventory, meanwhile an SSP (supply-side platform) is used to sell ad inventory. A DMP (data management platform) is used to collect data on users either on a website or ad campaign activities. All these platforms use cookies, specifically third-party cookies. These systems have been a game changer on how we operate in digital marketing, how we measure our ad campaigns throughout the past 10 years or so and until now they provided what we called a tailored experience or ad personalization as these cookies provide us with information about what kind of content you view, thus what are your interests, thus advertisers can show you a specific products that are similar or based around you’re your personal interests. Due to growing privacy changes, consent forms and legal activities around the cookie - DMP’s will most likely become obsolete. DSP’s and SSP’s will no longer be able to provide accurate behaviour information of their audiences.Once the third-party cookie will no longer be active on Google chrome, all digital marketing as we know it will change for a long time. No one really knows the best solution, but we believe it to be the CDP.

The dream – a company knows enough (a lot) about each of their existing and potential customers, and develops a relationship (?) with each one individually (at scale, in a time-saving manner) to increase profit and business sustainability.

How? Consumers generate a lot of information every day. If the data is made easy to accumulate, manage and use - it has immense potential for your business. The ability to zoom-in on data at an individual level, analyse at scale, communicate both individually and in groups; all while increasingly using automation to save time.

That cannot be done without a Single Customer View (SCV) mindset and approach. The aim - gather (in a GDPR compliant way) as much data on each profile (customer) as possible. The pinnacle – lots of “Golden Records” (super-enriched profiles). The richer the profiles the more effective relationships building, thus the better the marketing communication (analytics, planning & activation), and thus the better the customer journey.

Question many of us have – is this even possible to source, clean, and store data, then analyse and use data for much improved targeting and activation? All without spending too much time and resources?

Yes! Not overnight, as it takes reorganization, time and also money. That is if the company has a platform that makes adding data sources easy and reliable. That makes data warehousing easy, allowing easy and safe access to data, used for analytics, marketing and customer journey improvements. All with little or even no heavy IT support.