For four years, adtech firms have been preparing for Google’s deprecation of the third-party cookies that power the programmatic advertising ecosystem.
But companies are still waiting to get returns on these investments of money, time, and labor, sources told ADWEEK. That’s been compounded by Google’s July announcement that the company would not, in fact, deprecate the cookie, but instead, give people more choice on how their data is used.
“TripleLift Audiences was designed to work in both cookied and cookieless environments,” said Andrew Eifler, chief product officer at supply side platform TripleLift, referring to its first-party cookieless solution that uses tech from data management platform 1plusX, which TripleLift acquired in early 2022 for a reported $150 million.
“However, adoption is certainly slower than it would have been if cookies were deprecated in 2022 on the original timeline,” Eifler said, noting interest in the product is still growing.
Google’s cookie pivot doesn’t make signal loss any less real. If Google offers users an Apple-like prompt to opt into cookie tracking, advertisers will likely have a much smaller group of users to target. It’s also worth noting that buy-side adoption lagged before Google’s pivot. Still, Google’s decision has undercut momentum around the adoption of cookieless solutions, which has forced businesses to redraw business strategies and redirect investment, sources told ADWEEK.
“The sales pitches [for cookieless solutions] have died off … Those emails just evaporated,” said one ad buyer speaking anonymously because they don’t have authorization to speak to the press. “My inbox is flooded with AI pitches but not cookieless pitches.”
A lack of urgency and half-baked solutions
Publisher, platform, and adtech partners have stalled on designing tech to make attribution possible without cookies, said the anonymous buyer source, especially around cookie-based pixels to track a user from an ad to a brand website.
“The urgency has fallen through the floor,” the buyer said. “I would love this stuff to get finished. I’m sitting in half-baked solutions and half-baked data.”
Case in point, programmatic consultancy Prohaska Consulting has not seen its identity practice, intended to help companies navigate the post-cookie world, grow as fast as anticipated.
“It’s a smaller percentage of what we do than what we anticipated” five years ago, said CEO Matt Prohaska.
Publisher network Raptive has redistributed resources away from testing Privacy Sandbox, Google’s suite of cookieless solutions, as the industry awaits more information about what Google’s new plan for cookies will be, said chief strategy officer Paul Bannister.
In the second quarter of this year, 20% of the investments Raptive made in cookieless solutions went on developing tech for and testing Privacy Sandbox. Today, that’s decreased to just 5%, Bannister said. Around 12 to 15 Raptive employees had been working on Privacy Sandbox for at least some of their workdays, equivalent to about four to five people working on the tech full-time. Now, just one person spends about half of their time on Privacy Sandbox, he added.
Google has not clarified exactly what it meant in its July blog post when it wrote, “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice.” But last month, Google Privacy Sandbox did announce several updates that addressed industry critiques.
The status quo remains
While adtech firms may have not seen the new business they expected from a fast-approaching cookie deprecation deadline, deals were never going gangbusters.
“Even before the announcement, buy-side engagement was lacking,” said Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange. “That has not improved since the change.”
Index Exchange invests around 3% of its overall revenue, equal to millions of dollars, in implementing the Privacy Sandbox solutions and has not decreased this investment following Google’s July announcement, an Index spokesperson confirmed to ADWEEK, (Reuters first reported this figure).
Even though third-party cookies remain, many users browse the web on their phones or on browsers that have long-deprecated cookies, like Safari. Several sources say that half of the web is already not addressable to advertisers via cookies.
Investing in solutions to commercialize this cookieless audience can pay off. Index Exchange said that using LiveRamp’s identity solution RampID on cookieless browsers leads to an estimated 144% increase in cost per thousand (CPM) impressions, compared to supply with no ID present.
“We know today that for users that we have opted into first-party data, those users we make a lot more money on,” Raptive’s Bannister said.