Marketers, publishers, and media and tech companies have known for years that the third-party cookies and mobile IDs on which they built a thriving ad business would eventually disappear. What may have seemed like an abstraction in 2016 is now a looming reality: Google has said it will fully phase out Chrome cookies and potentially mobile IDs in late 2024. Google has repeatedly delayed this timeline, but even if the dates shift, it’s game time for the ad industry to accept and embrace the cookieless future.

• Advertisers and publishers agree that first-party data holds the most promise as a post-cookie solution. That was one of the takeaways from a February 2023 DoubleVerify study on ad professionals’ perceptions of replacing cookie-dependent solutions. The trouble is that each party understandably has greater confidence in its own data than the other side’s. That underscores the limitations of first-party data. It favors large players with vast data sets, and those players tend to be stingy in sharing the data with ad partners. Further, troves of data are worthless if they are not actionable. This concern was implicit in the DoubleVerify survey, which specifically asked advertisers and publishers about data activation.

• Ad executives are uneasy about the transition away from long-standing identifiers, which speaks to a lack of readiness at the eleventh hour. DoubleVerify’s survey also found that these executives’ biggest concern was their ability to effectively target audiences.
• Ad execs are similarly concerned about being able to reach target audiences at scale. A January 2023 survey by International Data Corporation (IDC) and Ogury found that this was the top concern of ad executives worldwide. The same study found that more than 4 in 10 advertisers were unfamiliar or only moderately familiar with targeting methods that didn’t use third-party cookies or mobile IDs.