Head in the sand: brands risk losing their audience if they don’t switch to post cookie targeting solutions

Despite cookies having been wiped off of Apple’s Safari and Firefox, brands appear to be hanging onto Google’s third-party cookies for dear life.

This assertion comes following research from personified advertising platform Ogury conducted alongside IT market research firm IDC revealed that despite 60% of brand and media agency executives admitting they recognise the cookie is doomed, 40% of them are still yet to find cookieless targeting solutions that work to protect privacy.

According to Ogury, this is due to a lack of awareness among brands and agencies of cookieless technology. It also presents a threat to brands’ ability to reach their audiences, potentially limiting the scalability of their targeting if they fail to invest in necessary ID-less tech promptly.

Experts have warned that if they don’t adequately equip themselves to reach their audiences at scale without the use of cookies, they may find themselves without an audience.

Identifiers disappearing ‘is for the best’

Six in ten (60%) respondents believe user tracking relying on cookies is a source of reputational risk for brands and 56% believe cookies and IDs represent a threat to user privacy.

With overall opt-in rates for user tracking declining and Google’s official phase-out of cookies to occur on Chrome by the end of 2024, it appears there is a broad understanding among the industry that not only are cookies on their deathbed, but eliminating them is for the best - identifying a clear need for organisations to invest in cookieless targeting tech.

Despite this, 41% of those surveyed are only moderately, or not at all familiar with targeting methods other than those that leverage cookies.

Opportunity for cookieless targeting providers

This lack of awareness among advertisers indicates a sizable opportunity for companies providing targeting solutions free from advertising identifiers to gain more market share.

Regarding the forthcoming depreciation of third-party cookies, 32% of respondents said they will change their adtech suppliers and among them, 64% intend to increase budgets towards paying for suppliers that don’t use cookies or rely on personal data.

Time to wake up

Van Valdez, Associate Research Director, European Customer Experience at IDC, said: “Brands and media agencies will require guidance to navigate the new waters of alternative techniques to cookies, looking for innovative new partners to fill the void.

“However, for many, this highly technical area can be incredibly opaque.”

Geoffroy Martin, CEO at Ogury, added: “Clearly, advertisers are not seeing how huge and impactful the privacy wave will be.

“At Ogury, we've developed an IDless technology that allows advertisers to reach their intended audience at scale, while not collecting, or using, any personal data and ours isn’t the only one out there.”