Enough About Cookies! Can We Talk About Cake Now?

We have all seen the headlines taking over our feeds and inboxes mourning the Death of the Cookie. I don’t know about you, but I need a little less third-party cookie in my diet right now, or at least I need to read about something else for a while. 

In the wake of Google announcing its future deprecation of third-party cookies, some industry experts have moved on from the devastation and are discussing solutions to this shift in audience targeting. Check out the “menu” below of our top picks on this topic!

1.The Cookie Crumbled: Now What?

In this piece written by David Schwartz, a self-proclaimed Digital Marketing Geek, he does a great job of bringing the real conversation around the demise of the third-party cookie into view. Rather than taking a self-loathing-how-this-will-wreck-the-adtech-industry-perspective, he takes the reader down a journey of “what next and what does this mean?”. Follow David down the five stages of grief and walk away with some observations and predictions that are sure to make you think twice. Check out his article here.

2. Opinion: The Best Kind of Identity Replacement? Have Your Own Data

This AdAge opinion article is written by Brian Lesser of InfoSum. To quote Brian, “While you can spend lots of time analyzing the ramifications of this move—debating its fairness, speculating on motives, grumbling about contradictions—much of the chatter misses the point.” He then goes on to describe several examples in the past when marketers have been burned by the changing tide. The article ends on a positive note, emphasizing the opportunity marketers have in protecting and optimizing on first-party data. You can view the OpEd here.

3. Neustar Launches Unified Identity^tm Transforming the Future of Customer Data Management

Last month, Neustar announced the launch of their Unified Identity^tm solution as "the first customer data solution to connect, validate, and enrich customer data from all offline and online sources, improving CRM, marketing and analytics outcomes for brands". 

According to their press release, this new solution is powered by Neustar's identify graph platform and connects and augments online and offline data via a single next-generation identity infrastructure that has built in linkages across the marketing technology, data science and CRM-technology worlds. 

We look forward to learning more about this solution and how it will help marketers in a cookie-less world. For more information on this solution, click here to read the press release.

Last, but not least, let’s not forget about first-party data.

First party cookies will remain an important tool for marketers to use to enhance the customer experience. Most consumers are comfortable providing an advertiser with access to certain pieces of their data, when that the data is used to provide a more relevant experience.

Learn more about how first party intent signals can power your retargeting efforts and how brands are seeing results here.

The third-party cookie hype is just that…hype. In order to prepare for the upcoming change, lean into the richest data you have…first party data.