For years now the media industry has been talking about the impending demise of third-party cookies—that is, personal information and behavioral data about website users from sources other than the actual user.
Just a few months ago, Apple rocked the third-party data world when it declared that iOS 17 will automatically remove user-identifiable tracking parameters from link URLs and automatically removes them.
But the rise of generative AI and the potential disruption it represents has pushed the cookie conversation to the back burner. AI has decidedly become Topic One for the media industry throughout 2023.
Now, a Forbes columnist is saying there’s a much more immediate challenge for the ad industry: The end of cookies. It’s coming faster than the industry realizes, and it represents a revolution “that will be just as disruptive as AI,” says the columnist, Geoffroy Martin, CEO of a tech platform called Ogury, which specializes in ID-less personalization and says it delivers high performance while also protecting consumer privacy.
And, he writes, the ad industry isn’t ready for the revolution. “According to a global survey commissioned by my company, 41% of advertisers are only moderately, if not at all, familiar with targeting methods other than cookies or IDs,” Martin states.
The Fourth Wave of Advertising, says Martin, is best understood in the context of three previous waves, or epochs. The first is search advertising, which transformed marketers’ ability to target their messages. The second is the rise of social media, where users voluntarily gave social platforms reams of personal data, and allowed their interests to be tracked in minute detail. The third is the rise of retail advertising—where retailers leverage their unique access to consented consumer data to generate new revenue streams through the creation of networks that allow marketers to reach their customers across many verticals at their point of purchase.
The fourth wave, Martin says, will be the era of ID-less advertising. “In my view, this wave is unstoppable,” he says. To be ready, brands and agencies and media companies have to take a series of steps. Step one, says Martin, requires acknowledging that the era of personalized advertising is indeed ending.
Step two is doing an assessment of your data-technology infrastructure. “Once you have determined what tools and capabilities you have in-house, you will now be able to prioritize what gaps you need to fill,” Martin says.
And step three is to eschew the focus on user IDs, and instead set your sights on digital destinations where content is consumed. “This alternative offers our industry a promising pathway to implement a scalable, privacy-first approach to replace the problematic identity-based modality of the recent past,” Martin says.
Of course, Martin is just one voice, and there is in fact widespread focus on the cookie-less future, but it’s a proposition worth paying attention to.