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Indian commuters drives past an advertisement poster of Google in Bangalore on April 6, 2018. / ... [+] AFP PHOTO / MANJUNATH KIRAN (Photo credit should read MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Estragon: I cant go on like this.

Vladimir: Thats what you think.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Googles recently-announced delay of the end of digital ad cookies until at least year-end 2023 still leaves much of the multi-billion-dollar industry as uncertain of the future as the characters in Waiting for Godot, Becketts archetypal masterpiece of forward-looking angst. If you think you were pained as a parent by Barney the Dinosaurs ditty Who took the cookies from the cookie jar? wait until the entire cookie jar is gone from the digital advertising business.

Advertising in media prior to the digital age was often a big guessing game for buyers and sellers, summed up by the famous adage of department store magnate John Wanamaker: I know Im wasting half of my advertising dollars; I just dont know which half. The digital age has made it exponentially easier for advertisers to find their targeted audience and deliver specifically-focused messages that they want them to receive. Rather than spray and pray advertising to a mass audience, with demographics as your sole guide, you could focus heavily on just those folks most likely to be interested in your products.

Cookies have been the horse to draw targeted audiences to the advertisers desired well. Advertisers place cookies digital files on websites to gather information on users and their interests by digitally clinging to the user in their journey to other websites. When youve bought a pair of socks and cant stop seeing sock ads everywhere you go after that, its cookies that help make that happen. And when the website isnt owned by the advertiser (usually the case), the cookies are thus third party, placed with permission of the website owner/publisher.

To address at least in part concerns about the undermining of consumer privacy from often unknown cookie-tracking, Google announced in January 2020 that it would by year-end 2021 phase out support for cookies through its Chrome browser. Great news, right! Ummits a little complicated.

Googles Privacy Sandbox initiative, as well as Apples very public campaign highlighting its intent to eliminate cookie-equivalents in its controlled operating system, wont mean the end of consumer tracking online hardly. It would just mean that the power of who could track in the absence of alternatives would be more centralized with the digital giants who control the key online gateways. And there is the small problem that the entire ecosystem of digital publishing depends overwhelmingly on revenues from advertising, so you pull out that thread, and what does that business look like? As David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said to me this past week, One of the only things that people could actually count on and kept them connected during the pandemic was the digital ecosystem. If cookies are gone and cookie-fueled targeted advertising still propels the whole system, what does the post-cookies world look like?

OK, so then Googles announcement that the end of cookies will now be delayed until at least the end of 2023 is unambiguously good news for the digital advertising industry, right? Ummits complicated. Cohen acknowledged there is a need to develop the vision of the post-cookies world and shared his concern that the industry is not ready for that today. He cited an IAB industry survey from earlier this year in which 67% of respondents said they were prepared for cookies to end, but only 45% had concerns about their ability to target audiences without cookies. How can you be prepared for the end of cookies if you dont even realize that without them there is no clear approach to targeting your audience?

This uncertainty is bolstered by the advertising data firm Captify, which reported from its recent industry survey that 69% of advertisers expect their ad performance to decline once cookies are gone. Thats a pretty grim view of the future if the system isnt even prepared to tell you what the future looks like.

The challenge for industry leaders like Cohen is a lessened sense of urgency about the need for a post-cookies future. He notes that it takes a long time to turn around an aircraft carrier and much work must be done in educating the industry about potential alternatives, creating an agreed upon set of principles for what comes next, and most importantly testing alternatives to see what really works and what doesnt. He also acknowledged the need for the industry to be more forthright with consumers about the trade-off between enjoying the ease of access and breadth of diversity in free digital content that demands revenues to support it. Will consumers agree with Cohen and the great Joni Mitchell - You dont know what youve got til its gone?

Fundamental in all of this is that Cohen doesnt see a cookie-less future with one meta framework, but rather expects a portfolio of solutions to emerge. Part of it will certainly involve marketers making greater use of their first-party data from consumers coming directly to their content and then joining together with other marketers to share each others data. But balancing the need for consumer buy-in isnt going to be less complicated with this type of data than it is today.

A number of companies are developing their own identity solutions and visions of a cookie-less future. Giants of todays digital ad ecosystem such as The Trade Desk, LiveRamp and Lotame are developing means of identifying consumers according to their permission parameters. Other alternatives include that from ID5, whose CEO and Founder Mathieu Roche (and a fellow Executive in Residence at Progress Partners) told me he has been working at this for the last 4 years. Roche wants to buck the digital advertising industrys all-too-often temptation of overpromising and underdelivering by focusing solely on perfecting a consumer-compatible solution for identifying target audiences. He advocates for a neutral identity system which isnt driven to sell you data or other advertising services.

About the only thing we know for sure right now is that the digital advertising business is in for a lot more testing and learning in this space. In Waiting for Godot, the titular character never actually arrives (should I have called spoiler alert?). With at least two years of waiting until the exit of cookies, the digital advertising industry is hoping for a lot more certainty whenever this play actually ends.

Originally posted here:
Google Moves Cookies End To 2023 As Digital Ad Biz Awaits Alternatives - Forbes