Beyond The Sandbox – How Marketers Can Prepare For The Fast-Approaching Cookie Armageddon

In this op-ed, Melanie Hoptman, APAC chief operations officer at customer data platform provider LiveRamp, explains what marketers need to know and do to get ready for the deprecation of third-party cookies in 2024.

The time to start preparing for the cookie apocalypse was yesterday – third-party cookies on Chrome merely represent the final remaining third-party signal to fall. On the heels of the recent commitment to finally deprecate third-party cookies in the second half of 2024, the time for any holdouts to start planning is right now.

With more than half of the internet already post-cookie across Safari, Firefox, and Edge, savvy marketers are already looking ahead and prioritising solutions they know will endure past the end of 2024. LiveRamp’s cookieless identity infrastructure has been years in the making and is already scaled with publishers, and in wide use by LiveRamp’s customers.

How should marketers be evaluating the landscape?

Let’s start with the basics: there’s no silver bullet for the end of the cookie or other third-party signals that were common across the previous generation of the web.

Instead, marketers should be considering a mixture of three types of solutions: cohort, contextual, and authenticated solutions. These solutions are tried and true, and you may have heard of some – or all – before.

Cohorts

Cohorts mask individuals by placing them within a larger crowd; keeping web history out of the hands of third parties keeps this method private and secure.

Cohorts aren’t new – they’re similar to lookalike audiences and are a common tool for marketers. Major browsers are trialling various proposals for cohorts, so while the big picture is known, some of the finer details are yet to be ironed out.

One critical distinction here is cohorts do not enable marketing to individuals. The larger the cohort, the greater the chance of diversity within the group, making it a challenge for marketers to personalise, measure, and attribute their campaigns.

Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is another tool that’s existed for a long time. Aligning advertising to keywords and topics on a page can yield meaningful results, and works on every site.

However, drawbacks include that contextual advertising can be imprecise, and difficult to measure. Just as with cohorts, personalisation, measurement, and attribution are all challenges.

Authenticated identity

We see authenticated identity as the gold standard. The walled gardens thrived for so long because of authenticated identity – they made it easy for marketers to engage real people, and to understand their touchpoints across various devices and points of the customer journey. Now, authenticated identity can be leveraged by marketers and publishers across the open web, enabling people-based marketing.

Just as the walled gardens did, marketers can now benefit from people-based marketing to engage their customers across devices, while leveraging their accumulated first-party data to personalise experiences and deliver the value that consumers need to continue deepening the relationship. And as marketers use this to improve addressability, they simultaneously improve their measurement, using people-based identity to understand every touch point customers have with their brand and to better understand key outcomes like conversions – even if they happen outside the walls of their own first-party data.

Authenticated identity in the broader ecosystem

Since its inception, we’ve been working to scale authenticated identity, and have grown a premier ecosystem supporting it – including more than 14,000 publisher domains that are accessible to marketers at the person level via LiveRamp’s pseudonymous, people-based identifier. More than 90% of all consumer time spent online is spent on sites and social platforms integrated with LiveRamp.

Authenticated identity has flourished in every channel: digital, display, mobile web, mobile in-app, social, search, and CTV. Most recently, LiveRamp expanded its partnership with Meta to enable marketers to leverage LiveRamp’s authenticated identity to privately and securely leverage their own first-party data. By connecting with Meta’s Conversions API, also known as CAPI, marketers can better target, measure, and optimise campaigns to drive greater returns from their marketing investments.

Data Collaboration: the new frontier

By forming a comprehensive identity strategy – powered by strong first-party data – marketers also set themselves up for the cutting edge of what their data can do. Data collaboration offers companies of all sizes a way to build customer intelligence in a way that respects consumer privacy, by reaching outside the walls of their own data.

Cutting-edge authenticated identity offers interoperability. After building a robust first-party data strategy, and starting to transact on authenticated identity, it’s a natural evolution for marketers to start to envision the benefits of data collaboration. Interoperable authenticated identity makes it easy for marketers to enrich their first- and second-party data, and gain new customer insights in a privacy-conscious way.

Among the many benefits of data collaboration are customer acquisition and insights, leveraging these new data insights to identify target audiences, as well as enhance them with additional datasets.

Some of the biggest mistakes of the third-party cookie era were marketers disintermediating themselves from consumer relationships and losing sight of their most valuable ties, as well as building their marketing infrastructure on an unsustainable foundation – the third-party cookie – that was destined to run afoul of consumers, regulators, and tech giants. Now, by marketing to real people instead of devices, and reclaiming and rebuilding their relationships with consumers, marketers can improve their marketing immediately. Furthermore, they can lay a new foundation for advanced marketing capabilities that drive innovative, meaningful, and measurable results for their companies.