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.