The past five years have been an interesting creative exercise if nothing else. How would digital advertising operate if you removed third-party cookies, a technology never intended for advertising, but which have nonetheless become a core component of digital marketers’ toolkits?
How effectively would alternative identity solutions plug the gaps? How many of these solutions would the industry support? Which ones would be the chosen few once the dust settled? What role would Google’s own Privacy Sandbox play? Should we just give up on targeting individuals and go back to contextual targeting?
Now that Google has announced it’s not getting rid of third-party cookies after all, the question arises: is that really what all this has been? A theoretical exercise? Or, as some have suggested in the wake of Google’s announcement, a massive waste of time and resources?
The world beyond Chrome
The industry is certainly in a different place to where it was five years ago. Businesses on both the buy-side and the sell-side have tested a range of (purportedly) cookie-free solutions, or in some cases built their own. Brands and publishers have fostered more direct relationships with their audiences where possible, funnelling their data into ad tech-friendly databases. Some have put out press releases touting successful tests of completely cookie-free campaigns.
It seems unlikely that all this work will be scrapped following Google’s decision, for a few reasons.
Firstly, looking at the sell-side specifically, publishers’ investments in first-party data are in many cases paying off with higher and more consistent revenues. UK news publisher Reach, for example, says data-driven revenues (i.e. ad sales which use its first party-data) now account for over 40 percent of total digital revenues, up from around 20 percent in 2021. These revenues are less affected by fluctuations in page views, making them less vulnerable to policy changes from the big tech platforms.
More importantly, while cookies will remain a viable and useful signal for advertising on Google Chrome, digital advertising’s addressability problems stretch far beyond Chrome alone. Third-party cookies remain unavailable on browsers including Safari and Mozilla, and cross-channel campaigns need signals which, unlike cookies, work across devices.
“Google first announced the demise of the cookie 5 years ago and it’s easy to forget that the majority of all media is cookieless already anyway,” said Bram Meuleman, global head of strategy at Dentsu-owned media agency Carat. “We have spent the last half decade proactively diversifying our approach, moving away from relying heavily on third-party cookies to ramp up our investment in 1P data, contextual targeting, clean room collaborations, and advanced modelling for measurement.”
Alexander Cardno, global director of operational excellence at GroupM (now WPP Media), spoke in similar terms. GroupM ramped up testing of cookie-free targeting and measurement techniques after Safari and Firefox started blocking cookies by default. And Cardno said that even in the last five years, there’s been a significant reduction in cookie availability, a trend which he expects to continue despite Google’s decision.
“So, while there’s less risk of an immediate change, the industry is still moving toward reduced reliance on cookies,” he said. “That’s why we’re continuing to help clients prepare by testing and adopting AI-driven and privacy-enhancing technologies. Staying ahead means embracing new solutions and being ready for whatever comes next in digital targeting and measurement.”
… and the world beyond America
Jochen Schlosser, chief technology officer at Adform, emphasised that while Chrome is the dominant player in the US, this isn’t the case globally. “Each market is different. We have markets with 90 percent cookieless browsers,” he said. “So there might be US-based platforms which don’t care for those markets, because they have third-party cookies, as well as LiveRamp and UID which have scale to a certain extent. But in Europe that’s not the case.”
In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation has been another driver behind privacy-preserving technologies, and led to different technologies gaining traction compared with the US.
That’s not to say Google’s latest announcement won’t have any impact. Despite the press releases announcing successful cookie-free trials, plenty of these same buyers have continued to use cookies so long as they’ve remained available. Alternative identifiers and cookie-free targeting and measurement methodologies have gained traction and are likely to stick around, but will be used alongside cookies, which still serve as a useful additional signal.
And for those holdouts who resisted ever really investing in cookie-free technologies, the imperative has — in a sense — gone away.
“Anyone who didn’t invest in the last five years probably isn’t going to start investing now,” said Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of ID5. “There’s still a massive need for addressability, but If they’ve been happy to just avoid Safari completely for this long, they probably won’t change now.”
Back to 2019?
What about the alternative identifiers themselves? Google’s original decision to kill off third-party cookies had opened up a significant opportunity for these companies: cookies are so widely used and seemingly needed to be replaced — enter the alternative identifiers. What does their future look like now?
That these solutions still have a significant role to play seems evident from the fact that one such alternative identifier, the Epsilon ID, sits at the heart of the data strategy of the agency holding group which has delivered the highest growth over the past five years, Publicis. And while WPP is placing its bets on an approach based more on AI than IDs, data pinned to identifiers will still play a role.
GroupM’s Alex Cardno said that third-party identity solutions remain just as important as before Google’s latest announcement. “With the continued reduction in third-party cookies, there’s still a real need for reliable alternatives across the open web.” he said. “What’s more, third-party ad tech continues to play a crucial role by creating privacy solutions that work outside of the big walled gardens. We’d also encourage the industry to focus on developing stronger, multi-signal approaches to keep things robust and future-proof.”
Carat’s Bram Meuleman agreed that these solutions will continue to play a valuable role, adding that he expects to see more probing from marketers into how well ID solutions are delivering. “We expect marketers will increase their scrutiny of how IDs are sourced, governed, and deployed across platforms and we believe they will find those IDs to not serve their needs as well as they should,” he said.
It’s important to remember too that the alternative identifiers with the most traction existed before the pandemic, and they often use cookies as one of the many pieces of data they use to identify individuals across different contexts.
“We’ve been around since 2017, so for us, we can just pick up our 2019 playbook,” said ID5’s Mathieu Roche. “Plus there are new areas like CTV where we’re finding growth which aren’t related to cookies.”
Prospects aren’t necessarily so bright for all identity businesses however. Without the driving force of the cookie deadline, Roche said that newer technologies would likely struggle to grow. Where alternative IDs have already built sufficient scale, there is already a good business case for new clients to sign up. Without that critical mass, finding new business may prove harder.
The future for Google’s own Privacy Sandbox also looks… uncertain. Google’s original line when it first announced its plans to sunset cookies was that the Sandbox would create technologies so good, there would be no need for cookies anyway. It seems fair to say this isn’t quite how things played out in practice. IAB Tech Lab caused a stir at the start of last year when it released an analysis of Google’s tools, stating that at their current state of development, they “[could not] be assembled into a whole that provides a viable business foundation”.
Magnite CEO Michael Barrett put it succinctly on a recent earnings call: “Forget the Privacy Sandbox, that thing was dead upon arrival”.
They think it’s all over
One common reflection on Google’s latest update was that at least it brought some clarity after years of shifting timelines uncertainty.
Though things aren’t necessarily so straightforward.
Again, cookies are just one signal in the broader identity landscape. Moves which restrict other signals, such as IP addresses, will further disrupt digital ad targeting and measurement. Meanwhile with more and more US states introducing privacy legislation, there’s always the potential for new laws to come into place which hamper the use of these sorts of signals, cookies or otherwise.
Indeed, Adform’s Jochen Schlosser said there’s still plenty of cookie-related activity which doesn’t comply with Europe’s GDPR, even though that law came into force seven years ago.
“It’s a big question: are your partners compliant, or are they running cookie matching at will?” said Schlosser. “I’ve had a lot of calls in the last five years from people who have run scans and seen that cookie matching is going on, and I tell them it’s not us, it must be another one of their partners — it’s not easy to govern cookies!” With this in mind, there’s always the potential for a European data authority to crack down on problematic cookie practices.
There’s also the fact that Google could be forced to sell off Chrome, depending on the ruling in the ongoing antitrust case against its search business. If that happens, whoever buys Chrome could themselves decide it’s in their best interest to kill off cookies. And the buyer likely wouldn’t face the same regulatory friction which Google faced, since there would (presumably) be less of an antitrust angle.
“That would be the best future for the industry: divest Chrome, and on day one, the buyer cuts third-party cookies,” said Schlosser. “I wouldn’t have a problem with that, I just don’t know whether it will happen. It’s a question of how important Chrome is as an asset to Google, and also how they weigh that up against Android, where they have similar plans” (with their Privacy Sandbox for Android).
Originally posted on VideoWeek on 3rd June 2025
