Walled Gardens

FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) is one of the most significant sectors in the economic market nowadays. It is also recognized as the sector most resistant to the economic crisis, which became clearly visible when pandemic hit. Nevertheless, brand visibility in this sector can be really important. Products in the FMCG sector are the fast-moving ones, the bare necessities. At first glance, it may seem that the FMCG sector does not need such a large visibility increase. However, advertising campaigns are a must-have mainly because of the great competition among brands in the FMCG industry.

For years, brands and agencies have been using third-party cookies to track website visitors’ behavior, improve the user experience, and collect trending martech data from across the web to optimize audience targeting strategies. However, this year Google announced that it would be joining Firefox and Safari in removing third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by 2023, ultimately changing the future of advertising. Marketers across the world have spent the last 12 months digesting, understanding, and preparing for this change. In this article, Julie Keating, VP of Digital Marketing and Media at Havas Edge, shares her journey from first hearing Google’s announcement to change the future of advertising, to recent learnings from campaigns that have used cookieless targeting solutions.

Targeted ads have come under fire for the past few years due to a toxic combination of privacy concerns, and the potential for abuse during democractic elections. While targeted ads can help us find products that we’ll love, the seemingly magical way that they can predict what we want has unsettled many consumers, and led to very real concerns about how our data is collected and used, and thus the rise of the cookieless future.

Have you ever downloaded the data Facebook has on you? Or Google? The sheer breadth of data collection has 86% of consumers worried, and this has led to a number of users leaving data-hungry social media platforms. It has also forced organizations like Google to do some soul-searching and adjust their approach to user data, notably by retiring third-party cookies.

We now know that third-party cookies will be staying with us a little longer. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox – a high-level plan indicating that it will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

The question is – how much more time does the industry actually have? The answer is – not much. Based on the official procedures for bringing new features to Chrome, we at RTB House expect that the next two years will be filled with work.

In this part of the “Media Review” series, we take a deeper look at five stories – including an analysis of the most influential stakeholders in the cookieless environment, UID 2.0 GDPR issues, and Google’s presentation of a new concept aimed at providing a privacy-preserving federated identity before third-party cookies are phased-out.