Is the Cookie Jar Empty? How the Absence of Cookies is Forcing Marketing to Evolve

While most marketers understand that web browsers are blocking (or have plans to block) cookies, many are still unsure what this will mean for their websites. That’s fair. Cookies have been an integral part of how the internet works for the last 20-ish years, and like smartphones, it’s kind of hard to imagine what the world would be like without them. When we consider the absence of cookies from the perspective of data-driven platforms, like Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), many marketers have been left wondering how all of this is going to work. 

It’s a fair question, and to grasp what the future of digital marketing holds, we must first understand that not all cookies will be obsolete. There is a distinct difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies, and first-party cookies will not be going away. First-party cookies are held by the site owners themselves. In a robust website, first-party cookies will sync with a CRM system to create accurate identities of all the visitors to a website. First-party cookies are not only here to stay, but they are about to be front-and-center when it comes to data collection and AEP. 

Third-party cookies, however, are going to become obsolete across all the primary web browsers by 2023 (and are already phased out of browsers like Firefox and Safari). These cookies are essentially third-party-owned information gatherers that live on websites (not owned by the third-party) to collect data to sell to interested parties. As the world’s emphasis on data privacy becomes much more honed, collecting data without the express knowledge and consent of the consumer is becoming a significant violation of consumer privacy and, more importantly, consumer privacy laws. With this in mind, web browsers like Firefox (in 2019), Safari (in 2020), and Chrome (in 2023) have taken or will take steps to prevent third-party cookies from tracking users and collecting their data without their consent. 

Beyond the ethics of protecting consumer privacy, there is a general expectation of brand transparency among many consumers. This expectation is pervasive across all aspects of the brand from the brand’s manufacturing processes to its data collection and privacy policies. Consumers now expect to know exactly what data you are collecting, what you plan to do with it, and how you plan to go about protecting their privacy. At this point, moving away from third-party cookies is not only being written into data privacy laws (GDPR for the EU and CCPA for California), but it is also becoming a table stakes requirement for doing business with many consumers.

Using this as the groundwork for what a “cookieless” future actually means, let’s take a closer look at how this is likely to manifest for marketers, as well as the solutions we are seeing that will most likely replace the vacuum left by third-party cookies. 

The purpose of cookies is to allow brands to better understand what their customers want by closely tracking the buyer’s journey. Robust marketing programs will take the data gathered from the cookies and use that to create a better online experience for their consumers. This may be by creating a better user experience (like auto-filling form fields) or, in the most advanced cases, by using real-time analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to create custom user experiences for every visitor to a website. 

For Adobe platform users, the latter use case would be utilizing AEP to its fullest potential. AEP couples real-time analytics as well as online and offline data with Adobe’s AI, Sensei, to create robust, highly personalized experiences for website visitors. 

This type of use case is really where we are seeing substantial evolution and innovation in the looming absence of third-party cookies. Technology is changing rapidly to incorporate online and offline, first-party consumer data to build highly robust profiles for each website visitor. 

Beyond highly detailed first-party data profiles, we are seeing the adoption of essentially what are data libraries, like Adobe’s Segment Match. In the case of Segment Match, companies can form strategic partnerships, sharing anonymous consumer data, to create tremendously cohesive consumer profiles - profiles that are not tied to any one person but offer a detailed schema that is representative of a type of consumer. These profiles can then be compared to the first-party data of real customers to more rapidly and accurately evolve their personalized experience on a website. 

We are just beginning to brush the surface of how the absence of third-party cookies is going to impact the future of marketing; however, it is clear that many marketing strategies will need to evolve and adopt new technologies along the way. 

Are you looking for a partner who knows how to help you build a website that incorporates the real-time analytics and AI of AEP? 

We do. We’re Hoodoo. 

Contact us today to learn more about how we have helped our clients integrate the full spectrum of AEP, and how we can help you do the same.