Cookieless future: What the end of third-party cookies means for brands

• January 23, 2024
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By Michael Sauvé, Account Director, Digital Media Strategy; Deanna Kenins, Sr. Account Director, Digital; and Nicole Grant, Sr. Vice President

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You’ve heard by now that with a new Chrome update, Google is killing third-party cookies. The update has begun to roll-out and so has advice for brands on coping with change. So, what’s it all about?

What are cookies?

Delicious baked goods, yes…  But on the digital marketing side, cookies are “markers” that share information with a brand about you or your behaviours on browsers and apps. These have played a vital role in the marketing ecosystem over the last few years.

Remember the Instagram shoe ad you clicked on? It’s the cookies you picked up that let advertisers know you’re in the market for shoes, and they’re the reason it feels like that ad is following you online.

‘Cookieless future’: What does it mean for marketers?

A “cookieless” future is a big change for the industry. How should businesses pivot? Brands who invest in creating their own spaces to build relationships and community will have the upper hand when it comes to gathering first-party data, which is becoming even more important. The more data they collect and own, the better they can understand their customers. The better they understand their customers’ behaviour, the better they’ll be able to reach them.

Without being able to rely on cookie-based targeting to sort audiences by behaviour, brands will have to get back to basics with their content strategies. They’ll have to produce content to pull prospects and customers into deeper relationships, rather than driving them toward a specific action. To resonate with users and within their circles of influence, brands will have to earn and sustain user attention in very intentional ways and leverage it for learning and insight. Where do they spend time? What stands out to them there? What creators speak to their communities and values? Which influence them?

How to prepare for the cookieless future

It’s always a been a good time to deepen and enrich your customer relationships. This year, it is essential to make room in your strategy for robust and experimental content creation, for social media community development and management, and for earned and contextually targeted paid media campaigns. This year, it’s essential that your media mix be built for the job.

So, what are your 2024 plans for collecting data and developing insights-anchored customer context? Do you have the right mix of content creation, social media community development and management, earned media, and contextual paid media strategies to build for the cookieless future?

To learn more about how North Strategic can help you navigate the cookieless future, contact us today.

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