3rd-party Cookies

In early March, the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB Europe, released the latest update to their Post Third-Party Cookie Era guide.

Have you heard of Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) yet? SDA was released at the beginning of 2022 by Project Rearc – an initiative that came to life as the IAB Tech Lab’s answer to the impending demise of 3rd-party cookies. Although a year hasn’t passed since its release, SDA has received significant attention in the press and industry conferences and is considered one of the go-to solutions for targeting when the 3rd-party cookie pond dries up.

Google proposed that instead of deprecating third-party cookies for all users in Chrome, they will let users decide whether to allow third-party cookies in the browser. Google also emphasized their continued investment in the Privacy Sandbox to ensure its performance and utility.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

The digital world is a complex ecosystem designed to simplify access to information and help people connect easier with fewer limitations. While not paying for it directly, we need to remember that apart from being a content platform, the Internet is also an enormous marketplace, where we – as users – are clients.

We may still be a long way away from anything like the Replicants in Blade Runner, but artificial intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning in particular are already transforming how we approach everything from cancer screenings to displaying ads. ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have made headlines for their eerily accurate imitations of humans. The ability for ChatGPT, and AIs like it, to answer questions and even create functional (if buggy) code has created a media furor that has driven significant investment in AI-focused companies, despite shaky markets.

However, if you dig a little deeper you’ll begin to see that while ChatGPT is really cool, it is just one part of a much bigger picture. Let’s dive in and find out why.