The recent news of Google delaying the depreciation of 3rd Party Cookies may be a party we should put on hold for a few months. The industry seems giddy with relief and a sense of business as usual. Some thought leaders like Paul Bannister have suggested we should keep the pedal to the metal and build sustainable, privacy respecting ecosystems, regardless of this short term news cycle. I agree whole heartedly.
Please keep in mind - Google is in a tough spot with Anti-Trust, their advertising partners, and publishers alike. If they stop moving forward on privacy policies they could get a backlash from privacy regulators and be called out as being hypocritical.
So, what will be next?
The short answer is "we will find out soon enough"
The longer answer is lies what other levers does Google / Chrome have to increase user privacy, and sustain their stronghold on the ads business. Apple has recently announced the upcoming elimination of IP address use on Safari, perhaps Chrome will do the same? Also, like Safari, Google could shorten the window of expiration to 1 day or 1 week. Further, Google / Chrome may decide to take action to eliminate or curtail UID development while things get sorted on the 3P Cookies. Finally, let's not forget about Android, and Google can follow suit to the iOS 14.5 release privacy measures.
Google has stated that they want to eliminate all 3rd Party Data Collection and Usage, along with the tactics including fingerprinting and UID / permanent ID's. This greatly benefits Google, and the consumer to some extent.
Let's dig into the consumer here a bit. I believe, and recent data on iOS 14.5 suggest that users want to keep their data private, when asked. What is not being asked to consumers is... "do you still want a free and open internet?" If publishers and advertisers lose their basic economics of running a business, then publishing will consolidate to the most tech savvy and lucrative margin pub businesses. High quality reporting, video creation, editorial, and analysis takes enormous resources.
As a consumer, publisher, ad tech guy I believe that result based advertising which google practically invented with paid search is essential to the fabric of the open and free web. Personally I feel comfortable with being targeted with relevant ads, re-targeted on products I've shopped for, etc. There are many ways to enable ad targeting and attribution without so much data leakage. In this case look at InfoSum and their methods on data matching and privacy united.
It's still clear that publisher 1st Party Data will stand the test of time (5 years or more), and worth while pursuing at scale. The main issue will be data unification, validation, and attribution. These are solvable problems even with privacy at the forefront.
I'm sure we'll see a headline before Q4 stating what Google is going to do instead of deprecating cookies in the new year.... It will be interesting to see how they proceed from here
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