Marcello Gruppo, Senior Director, Research&Insights Southern Europe di Ogurytalks about the timing and prospects of the cookie disposal phase.
Last April 26, in the joint quarterly report of Google and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the United Kingdom on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, the Mountain View giant announced a postponement in its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome.
Despite the media outcry aroused, the fact that the discontinuation of cookies by Chrome may be postponed from 2024 to 2025 is not relevant: it is more than normal that the bodies responsible for safeguarding the competitive environment of the market carry out in-depth checks during a process like this. What is happening is an infrastructural change of extraordinary importance.
The cookie phaseout actually began on January 4, 2024, when Google initiated this process involving 1% of Chrome users – approximately 30 million users globally.
Google Chrome currently holds 67% of the market share in the browser sector, which, it should be remembered, constitute the technological infrastructure we use to browse the internet. The inability to exploit the potential of cookies on Chrome represents a significant obstacle for the adoption of alternatives to the current targeting solution offered by the giant Google, which are mainly based on the use of cookies to collect profiling data. It is therefore crucial to maintain a competitive environment in the context of digital advertising.
Disposal of cookies, scenarios
The ongoing checks accurately reflect the significant scale and impact of the change generated by the abandonment of cookies. Any delays in completing the process can be considered physiological and an integral part of the process itself and, I add, totally in line with market expectations. Postponing the completion of the trial does not change the fact that the industry faces a turning point in protecting consumer privacy.
This journey began long before Google decided to disable cookies and advertisers can no longer look the other way.
The concerns raised by CMA in competition matters are valid, but the priority for the market must remain the protection of consumer privacy and the fight against the tracking of their personal data.
For this reason, we think that advertisers should not see this situation as an excuse to once again postpone the move to cookieless o ID-less. This latest delay should instead be seen as an opportunity to invest in already tested and proven solutions that allow you to scale without depending on changes in timing or future industry decisions.
There are many areas of our ecosystem mired in the inertia of third-party cookies and advertising IDs: several players proposing unified IDs face an almost insurmountable challenge to create the scalability that marketers have become accustomed to during the era of third-party cookies.
As an industry, we should look to the future and focus our efforts on technologies that qualify impression in base alle personas and based on destinations (apps and websites), where users consume content, rather than through personal data. This approach allows you to reach audiences relevant to brands and ensures scalability, respecting user privacy and the regulatory regimes to protect it.