COOKIELESS UPDATE 2024:
Have you heard the news? Third-party cookies are here to stay.
The end of third-party cookies represents a once in-a-generation opportunity for brands to not just change how they connect with customers, but to strengthen those connections and build improved experiences.
Third-party cookies have been an essential building block of personalized advertising for decades, helping ad networks provide increasingly fine-grained audience segmenting and attribution. By the end of 2022, however, no major web browser will support third-party cookies, following increased ad fatigue from consumers and tighter regulation from governments. This shift represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to not just change how brands connect with customers and leads, but to strengthen those connections.
As trust and transparency grow, likely so will consumer willingness to share more data with the brands they love too—giving brands more nuanced opportunities to treat people as people through intuitive, ideally timed engagement, while providing consistent and respectful brand experiences across touch points.
The potential benefit to consumers cannot be understated.
Data that works smarter
In a post third-party cookie world, consent-driven engagement and personalization can lead to a more effective consumer experience. So, how can you make your data work smarter for you? By focusing on three key initiatives:
Shared context, shared messaging
As third-party cookies phase out, the messaging that remains can help forge a human connection with new customers by getting relevant first, then getting personal. Even without third-party cookies, there are three types of third-party data that can be leveraged:
Getting creative with data in context can add value, build trust, and inform your brand’s messaging with a more personalized focus—minus the third-party cookies.
How to be transparent with customer data
Going from tracking to trust requires transparency. Giving consumers full control over the data you collect about them helps to establish trust with new prospects and grow the value of existing customers. Approaching data privacy by giving informed consent regarding its usage, sharing, sale, and transfer can create a relationship of openness and collaboration.
This means asking for the right data, in the right way, and focusing on the types and quantities you accumulate:
As brands move toward a future without third-party cookies, it’s important to develop a thorough understanding of how to connect your data, evolve your privacy practices, and provide messaging that improves the human experience for your customers.
