A new study by Aroscop and Brand Equity that polled over 450 marketers, advertisers, publishers, and technology providers, found that brands are yet to truly embrace a cookieless future. This is further evidenced by the fact that only 22% of the respondents believe that a cookieless future may have a severe impact on brand building.

Most respondents said that techniques like frequency capping, personalization, behavioral targeting, and retargeting would experience the brunt of the shift to cookieless marketing. However, the study found that only 8% of the respondents have deployed alternate solutions to prepare for the shift. 35% of respondents stated that they are actively looking out for solutions better adapted for cookieless marketing.

Among the brands, only 13% are actively leveraging their first-party data, while 64% plan to do so in the next six months. The study also revealed that 66% of agencies believe that their clients will deploy first-party data to create better advertising campaigns in the next six months. Similarly, 67% of publishers are also expected to embrace first-party data to drive better advertising outcomes.

To explore the marketer’s mindset relative to third-party cookie deprecation, Epsilon commissioned a third-party research study with Phronesis Partners Inc.:

1. Most marketers are very or moderately reliant on third-party cookies.
 
2. Less than half of marketers feel “very prepared” for the change.
 
3. Actual benefits to consumers are in question.
 
4. 70% of marketers believe digital advertising will take a step backward.

Nielsen unveiled its ID resolution system last week that will support cross-media measurement, including digital, in a cookie-less world. This comes ten months after Google first announced that it will phase out third-party cookies by 2022. According to Nielsen, its ID resolution system comprises ecosystem connectivity, machine learning models and Nielsen ID. Additionally, it will also work with The Trade Desk and the industry on Unified ID 2.0, an open and interoperable ID built on hashed and encrypted email addresses.

This move is in a bid to reconcile various first party IDs and replace third party cookies across the digital ecosystem. Besides Nielsen, Unified ID 2.0 has also received support from other adtech firms in the industry including PubMatic, Magnite, Criteo and LiveRamp. Unified ID 2.0 was created by The Trade Desk to help companies prepare for a cookie-less world. The Trade Desk said that the latest ID framework will be built from hashed and encrypted email addresses, while remaining open and ubiquitious, and at the same time ensuring consumer privacy and transparency.

Given that Safari and Firefox both announced that they are removing third-party tracking cookies in 2017 and 2018 respectively, Google's move might not be a new one. However, it is safe to say that Google's announcement rang alarm bells because more than 60% of users are on Chrome. According to web traffic analysis company Statcounter, Google Chrome's market share stands at 64%. 

With the cookie set to become obsolete over the next year or two, marketers will no longer be able to rely on retargeting to identify and price their most likely customers. Rather than making spending decisions based on who the consumer is and what sites they’ve browsed in the past, advertisers will instead need deep insight into the context surrounding every click.

The era of the cookie is coming to a close, and marketers will have no choice but to return to the pre-cookie days of making their decisions based on context. And in order to get context-based marketing right, they’re going to need lots of transparency.

Fundamentally, marketers are most successful when they’re maximizing a ratio known as lifetime customer value to customer acquisition costs (LTV-to-CAC). Without a transparent buying partner, marketers don’t get the context they need to pursue this goal effectively.

• The end of third-party cookies brings an opportunity for brands to build relationships of trust with their customers. Ultimately, cultivating trust comes down to how brands handle customer data, however they come by it.
• Part of adopting a new approach to engaging with data is considering when and how first-party personal information is collected. The “how” is an important foundational detail, as it may set the tone for the marketer’s relationship with the customer, determining whether or not a customer chooses to opt-in to share their information at all.
• Even after consent is obtained, customers and prospects have the right to change their minds. It’s an ongoing conversation between a customer and a brand, and so the ability to grant or revoke consent at multiple points in time is critical.
• Smart data use provides relevancy, and the brands that are positioned to thrive in a world without third-party cookies will likely be those that recognize a simple truth: You earn the right to be personal by first being relevant.
  Ultimately, it’s up to the brand to use it to deliver better content and experiences and grow its customer relationships.

• Brands will need compliant and consumer-friendly ways to collect, enrich, and organize first-party data. The first step is to honestly ascertain – who you are, who your target audience is, and what you can afford.
• Attribution based on third-party cookies will no longer be possible, and in its place will be new identity and people-based data sources and advanced methods, such as mixed-media models. 
• Technologies like customer data platforms (CDPs) that can connect first-, second-, and third-party data to support audience management and activation using persistent IDs like first-party email addresses and PII, will grow in importance and will ultimately evolve into enterprise-wide customer management platforms.
• Measurement in a world without cookies can ultimately be achieved with proper structure and planning. Begin with clarity about your business model and what you want to accomplish. If it is simply to accelerate sales, acknowledge and accept that as the design and outcome.

Exclusive to MarTech Today, data-based digital marketing platform Epsilon said it has launched what it calls an “industry-first solution” to measure the impact of brand campaigns at an individual level, superseding self-reporting from small sample groups.

The solution is part of Epsilon PeopleCloud, a platform which supports personalized customer journeys. The output is a brand consideration metric, defined as the percentage of consumers who, after receiving a brand message, go on to visit the brand’s website, open a brand app or email, or research the brand on a third-party website.

The primary focus is on brand consideration, rather than consideration of specific products and services. “However, we can use the insights to understand if people considering a brand browsed certain categories,” Matt Feczko, Epsilon’s VP Product Management told us. “In addition, we can measure the impact of lower-funnel sales and purchases of specific items or categories. Ultimately, we can understand how many people eventually bought tennis shoes (online or offline) from those who browsed the tennis shoe category.”

Doing away with third party cookies has been touted as “privacy enhancing” for consumers. However, years of research have shown that doing away with cookies, both 1P and 3P, does not necessarily increase privacy. This is because ad tech companies have found “work arounds” to continue to uniquely identify users, even without using any cookies. 

Browser Parameters - This is called “fingerprinting.” Just like fingerprints are unique to each individual, digital fingerprints can be made from combinations of browser variables. For example, by gathering variables like the browser name and version, screen resolution, list of fonts and plugins, and IP address and location, companies can identify unique users with 99% accuracy. 

Demographic Attributes - Adtech companies also claim that users’ privacy is already protected because no PII is collected or used. However, privacy researchers spotlight the lie of ‘anonymous’ data. “Researchers from two universities in Europe have published a method they say is able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of individuals in anonymized data sets with just 15 demographic attributes.”

Browsing Histories - In addition to being able to uniquely identify or re-identify users with browser variables or demographic attributes, new research from Mozilla shows that browsing histories can also be used to uniquely identify individual users. 

How Common Is Fingerprinting? "We find that browser fingerprinting is now present on more than 10% of the top-100K websites and over a quarter of the top-10K websites," the research team said.

Whether or not the blocking of third-party cookies is good for consumers, it clearly presents a major challenge to brands, agencies, tech vendors, advertisers and publishers. That’s why they’ve come together as an industry to make use of the window of opportunity provided by Google.

“We decided to band together,” said Bill Tucker, Group EVP leading the Data, Technology, and Measurement Practices at the ANA , and executive director of the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media. “The trades, representing the biggest marketers in the world—ANA and WFA. Publishers. Agencies and agency holding companies. The technology universe. We’re in dialog with the browsers.”

The Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media will have four working groups: legal and policy, business use cases, communication and education, and the IAB’s Project Rearc tech lab working on technical standards.

"The decision to kill off third-party cookies is widely regarded as a necessary evil, but who gets to determine their replacement?

The uncertainty has prompted some companies to develop turnkey solutions that are privacy compliant. Google—whose decision to eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022 created the vacuum—also has a solution, as does ad retargeting kingpin Criteo.

Whichever technology emerges, it will address critical advertiser capabilities including ad targeting, frequency capping, user privacy and attribution. And it will enable an enormous advertising market; last year, third-party cookies helped fuel nearly 30 percent, or $38 billion, of all U.S. digital ad spend."

And yet in Econsultancy’s survey of more than 800 marketers that informed the Future of Marketing Report, just 36% of marketers stated that they had a good understanding of the third-party cookie crackdown.

Almost half (43%) see themselves as not having a good understanding, while the remaining 21% do not know enough – or do not believe it applies to them.

If your website or mobile application requires the creation of user accounts and logins, it’s time to plan to transition away from cookie-based tracking to user ID tracking. In simple terms, instead of having your analytics toolset read a cookie, you pass a unique identifier associated with the user ID and then track the user via this identifier. Typically the identifier is the login ID.

As more online brands look for ways to move beyond third-party cookies as a way of gaining more direct insights about their users and customers, a startup that has developed a platform to help them has raised a big round of funding. Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that uses data gained from direct marketing like email, social media, site activity and combines that with machine learning to make better predictions about who might want to buy what among its customers, is today announcing that it has raised $50 million.

The funding will be used to build the next generation of the Bluecore platform, expected later this year, which will tap into aggregated engagement data (but not actual browsing individuals) from “hundreds” of brands, which customers can combine with their own first-party data — based on consent-based, first-party customer IDs — to develop better targeting insights.