Way back in January 2020, Google told the world it would be removing cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022. Then they pushed it back to late 2023, then to late 2024, then earlier this year to late 2025 and now they have scrapped the whole plan. They will still push their cookie alternative, the Privacy Sandbox (PSB), and let people make ‘informed choices that apply across their web browsing’¹.
The problem here is that PSB isn’t yet fit for purpose (per the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office), and regardless of browser, 70% of people choose to block cookies being dropped.
So why is the Cookie-pocalypse worthy of such big attention in the marketplace? Finding audiences – niche or at scale – has never been a problem. Putting an ad in a magazine is niche audience targeting, buying contextually is niche targeting, specific OOH sites are niche targeting, none of which need a cookie. Similarly, measuring incremental growth for clients has never been a problem, as Media Mix Modelling or Econometrics doesn’t rely on cookies.
If the fundamentals of growth through marketing aren’t impacted, then what is?
The impact is on measurement, specifically metrics that don’t matter but are easy to manage and manipulate in digital systems. Clicks and CTR are examples of pointless but commonly used metrics that are easy to manipulate in a digital system. CTR is not a result of great audience targeting but of finding people who click, with 80% of clicks online carried out by 8% of people, meaning there are clickers and non-clickers. If you tell a buying platform you want clicks, it will find people it knows to click on ads using information stored in a cookie. The other way it will find clicks is through finding bots on fraudulent websites set up by criminals to manipulate the system and get paid.
This incentivisation of digital signals as optimisation and success clearly devalues supply and publishers, with buyer priorities moving away from ‘right place’ for the sake of ‘right person, right time’. Moving budget to where digital metrics are satisfied means buying in-app where users click by accident when trying to close an ad, buying in Made For Arbitrage and fraudulent websites and ultimately not buying in quality environments which drive actual business results for our clients.
This decision from Google will be welcomed by those entrenched in the convenience of lazy practices. Buyers using bad metrics can still look for performance in the ~50% of inventory covered by cookies – although this figure is declining over time.
What the attention over the Cookie-pocalypse has highlighted is that now is the time to mature as an industry.
Now is the time to give the power back to publishers and cut out the middle tech. Publishers create high-quality environments for our brands to show their ads in. They have huge amounts of first-party data with deep, exclusive knowledge of what their customers like, what they are interested in, and what they buy.
Now is the time to focus on supply, where you can guarantee high-quality environments for high-quality outcomes with no risk of fraud.
Now is the time to focus on the scale of the opportunity with partners who can give you access to all inventory, not just shop in the shrinking circle of inventory that conveniently maintains the status quo.
Now is the time to focus on measurement that ladders up into growth metrics, not pointless digital metrics.
This is where Resolve comes in. We have been working with thousands of publishers for years to enable them to model all of their inventory and create addressable audiences on 100% of their inventory, totally free of identifiers. We offer these audiences exclusively to our clients, giving them access to publisher 1PD they never had before through audiences at significantly increased scale.
This benefits publishers with higher revenue for inventory they were previously selling as blind run of site, it benefits brands with exclusive scaled audiences in high-quality environments at competitive pricing and, it benefits the economy by funding journalism and high-quality environments.
Speak to us now at hello@Resolve.tech
