By Amy Ji
Brands have long relied on third-party cookies to track customers and deliver personalized ads as they surf the web. Now that era is coming to an end — the cookie is crumbling. Zak Doffman, cybersecurity expert and contributor at Forbes, highlights that “Chrome now has more than 70% of both the mobile and desktop global markets“ and is planning to phase out third-party cookies by early 2025 (Google). This shift will completely upend how brands track, target, and measure digital marketing initiatives. A cookieless web can seem daunting, but this marks the perfect chance for brands to adopt new privacy-friendly strategies. This change will fundamentally reshape how brands reach and understand consumers online.
What’s Happening and Why it Matters
Third-party cookies are small pieces of tracking code set on a user’s browser by a domain other than the one the user is currently visiting (McKinsey). These cookies allow brands to track users across multiple sites, leading users to see ads for a brand as they browse unrelated pages. This cross-site tracking fueled the rise of highly targeted advertising. But amid privacy concerns and regulations like GDPR and CCPA, consumers and policymakers are rejecting invisible monitoring (Defero). Arielle Feger, newsletter analyst at eMarketer, highlights that only 17% of U.S. consumers say they always accept tracking cookies, signaling a new privacy-first era.
Once Google phases out cookies, brands will lose the ability to track users, retarget ads, and measure multi-touch journeys. Kabir Ahuja, Senior Partner at McKinsey, and colleagues underscore that removing cookies will “have a detrimental effect on advertising efficiency and ROI in the short term”. Brands and publishers can lose up to 50% of ad revenue when cookies disappear, reflecting how dependent marketers have been on these tracking mechanisms (McKinsey).
How Brands Are Responding
The phase out of cookies does not mean the end of digital marketing. However, brands must adapt their strategies and tech stack to the changing conditions. Kabir and colleagues (McKinsey) suggest three core strategies moving forward: collecting first-party data, partnering to share data, and leaning into contextual and interest-based advertising.
- Build First-Party Data: Without third-party cookies to rely on, brands must use their own customer touchpoints to build their own collection of customer data. First-party data is information that brands collect directly from consumers as they visit their websites, use their mobile apps, make purchases, etc. (McKinsey). These data points are collected with consumer consent, allowing brands to build direct customer relationships based on trust and decrease reliance on third-party brokers.
- Partner to share data: To pivot, companies must start identifying strategic partners with whom they can share data for mutual benefit. Some of these partnerships include retailers, publishers, or other brands that overlap with the brand’s consumer base but aren’t direct competitors. Alex Bloore and Steven Urgo from Goodway Group suggest secure environments, such as data clean rooms, that allow partners to share first-party data without leaking private consumer information. These partnerships and privacy-safe data blends can become a key advantage in targeting when broad tracking is gone.
- Contextual and Privacy-Safe Targeting: With AI-powered marketing, brands can use contextual targeting to analyze page content and deliver relevant ads to consumers. Meanwhile, Google’s Privacy Sandbox introduces APIs like Topics, which allow browsers to share broad interest categories (“Travel,” “Fitness”) without exposing identities (Defero).
The Bigger Picture
The crumbling of the cookie isn’t the end of personalization. Brands that focus on transparency, value exchange, and robust first-party data will thrive in this new era. As McKinsey notes, the future belongs to marketers who “use their own customer touchpoints, partner to share data, and lean into contextual advertising”. This new privacy-first era will push brands to build more trusting relationships with their consumers and use and collect data respectfully.
Amy Ji is pursuing her M.S. in Management of Technology at NYU Tandon, where she explores how innovation transforms the way we live and work.
