Apocalypse not now: Google’s cookie carpet pull points to ‘deprecation by default’, but the market has already moved on – and regulators are lining up

Google has clearly taken negotiation lessons from my teenage children: I’ll get it, I’ll get it, I’ll get it. Oops.

Yesterday’s announcement by the digital advertising leviathan that after four years of creating fear, uncertainty and doubt that it would abandon plans to deprecate cookies and instead move to a browser-based consent model was shocking. for some, as inevitable for others. Google had previously delayed the devaluation three times since first announcing the move in 2020.

Consensus view: Google is stuck between a regulatory quagmire and the rock on which it has built its fortunes — that great fortress made of solid gold, built on mining its near-monopoly control of search (despite the incursions of AI ) along with its broader advertising ecosystem.

Contextual changes

The context of the time of the announcement is important. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will publish its quarterly update on its assessment of Google’s third-party cookie approach, and some of what has come out of the CMA over the past year has been encouraging for Google.* the regulator seemed to be strengthening its views. The fact that Google made this announcement before the latest CMA update is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the DOJ antitrust case starts in September, and if it loses the case, Google faces the possibility of a mandatory spin-off of its adtech business. DOJ prosecutors allege the firm gets at least 30 cents for every digital dollar that flows through its pipes and wires — sometimes much more — with the market left with few alternatives and competitors squeezed.

According to Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at Check My Ads, “The CMA’s next quarterly report should be out any day now, and we may have some clarity there about the ‘why now’ of this announcement. But if I were to think about the rest of the driver here, it’s that they’re going to an antitrust trial. There’s all this hype around spinning off the sell side of their ad tech business. There are people who say “So you’re going to move it all to the browser and then disconnect the sell side of the ad tech business… that doesn’t really solve anything.”

“I think it’s very clear that this move is not independent of the fact that Google knows this [DOJ Antitrust] judgment is beginning and that minds and eyes are beginning to turn to what true remedies might actually look like.”

Saw it coming

According to research firm Forrester, the majority of B2C marketers in APAC did not believe that cookie deprecation would ever happen – and that number was steadily increasing.

“It’s no surprise that Google finally canceled its cookie deprecation plans after three delays in four years,” Forrester principal analyst Xiaofeng Wang told Mi3.

“Most marketers in APAC have seen this coming. According to Forrester’s 2024 Marketing Survey, 53 percent of B2C marketing decision makers in APAC did not believe Google would invalidate third-party cookies, up from 49 percent in 2023. This would further reduce the urgency for advertisers to adopt Privacy Sandbox, Google’s initiative to replace third-party cookies with privacy-preserving technologies.”

Wang pointed out that the devaluation was happening with or without Google’s plans.

“Consumers in APAC are becoming more privacy sensitive. For example, 42 percent of online Australian adults already clear their browsing history, 23 percent install ad blockers, and 21 percent use private or incognito mode on their browser to protect their online privacy,” she said, citing Forrester’s 2023 Consumer Standards Survey.

“Key consumer data privacy regulations, such as the GDPR and CCPA, and APAC-specific regulations such as Singapore’s PDPA and India’s DPDPA 2023, impose rules on the use of cookies by third parties, requiring transparency and consent of users,” she said.

Also of note from the Forrester Marketing Survey 2024, “64 percent of B2C marketing decision makers in APAC have invested in more zero- and first-party data collection, and 62 percent are testing more ad-based in context.” This shows that brands have already moved beyond cookies – at least partially.

“We’ve done a good job planning the world of cookies behind third parties. We have made the most of this opportunity to improve our targeting and measurement by improving our first-party data and audience strategy and will continue to focus on this,” said Louise Laing, ANZ General Marketing Manager at Intrepid Travel .

She acknowledged that third-party audiences will continue to be an important part of our toolkit, but told Mi3 that over-reliance on them would be dangerous.

“We want to get to know our customers better and provide them with an experience they enjoy. First-party and zero-point data collection through our proprietary channels remains the best way for us to develop that one-to-one relationship. And we can do this by giving customers control over how their data is used.”

User choice?

As for the specifics of the announcement, Chris Brinkworth managing partner at consultancy Civic Data said Google’s plan to introduce more choices around privacy and cookie choices could end up significantly reducing the use of cookies – but the overlap between cookies and APIs Privacy Sandbox in Chrome may end up creating more confusion.

Brinkworth said brands should prepare for these changes, but also questions why Google “may not fully educate them on the impacts already seen in other browsers, or why they push the industry toward their preferred advertising methods versus those that complement a truly open web”.

It’s important to think beyond Chrome, he said.

“Consider Google’s GA4 analytics tool as a ‘first-party cookie’ can generally track unique visitor information for a maximum of seven days within Safari as a first-party file, but much longer in Chrome. Meaning of these basic restrictions outside of Chrome is essential for businesses in today’s digital ecosystem, but somehow Google doesn’t feel it’s important to educate or warn businesses against such complacency in announcements like this.”

No backsliding

The message from industry associations, agencies and service providers was uniform; brands should avoid the temptation to back pedal and continue to build first-party data capabilities.

As Mi3’s Fast News reported yesterday, in a written statement released shortly after the news broke, ADMA CEO Andrea Martens welcomed Google’s change, but stressed the need for brands to continue with their initiatives regardless.

“For marketers, the proposals presented in the Privacy Sandbox to date have been troubling due to the negative impact they would have on ad effectiveness and campaign performance, while still not complying with privacy laws,” said Martins “ADMA is encouraged to sees Google taking a different approach, rather than dogmatically pursuing a solution that would benefit neither the consumer nor the marketer. We look forward to Google engaging with the industry as it rolls this out.”

Media companies have already invested significantly in first-party data architectures and say they are able to demonstrate the benefits for brands.

News Corp’s Paul Blackburn, director of commercial data and e-commerce, cited a 150 percent increase in click-through rates for travel business Beyond Journey through News’ first-party data set.

It’s a similar story at Nine, where chief data officer Suzie Cardwell noted that the publisher-broadcaster has been developing its first-party data infrastructure since well before Apple’s Safari cookie invalidation began in 2017 – and cited matching data increasing online visits to Coles by 32 per cent.

Free kick

Google’s ad tech competitors expressed skepticism about its intent.

“The advertising industry has moved on, realizing that the digital world extends beyond Chrome,” according to The Trade Desk ANZ vice-president James Bayes, who claimed The Trade Desk’s alternative cookie initiative, Unified ID 2.0, which creates an identifier by hashing email addresses. or phone numbers, is one of a number of “far superior identity solutions that are not controlled by Big Tech” and represent “a significant improvement to the Internet.”

He questioned whether Google would give consumers a real choice about tracking or effectively choose for them by selecting Chrome users and then making it difficult to opt out.

Others raised similar questions about Google’s broader use of consumer data — and whether Internet users would have a real choice about being tracked.