The end (of cookies) is near! Winter is coming (for everyone that uses cookies)! Are you prepared for the doom that will surely ensue when cookies go away?!
Well, hold on a second, what does this really mean?
The death of the cookie may have been slightly overplayed (no, cookies are not going away, per se) however the usability of third party cookies has been threatened for awhile.
There are different schools of thought around the extent of future changes to third party cookies on Chrome, but we saw ITP on Safari become very real, and iterating as we speak, so why should we not assume the same for Chrome?
So you survived the first rounds of Safari ITP, why should you be thinking about it differently this time around?
Looking at market share by browser, the scale and subsequent impact of third party cookies on Chrome is potentially much higher as Chrome adoption grows.
Your first party cookies may still be usable, but without the ability to tie to and maintain to third party cookies, the marketing and advertising application of that data is far less viable. Not to mention, many companies license other technology to represent and manage their cookie space, such as a DMP, DSP, SSP, or ad server. The hard reality is that those are third party party cookie domains and will be subject to the same limitations as other third party cookies, regardless of whether you’re treating them as if they were first party.
While it’s difficult to completely future-proof your business in this respect, there are some immediate steps you can take to prepare and help alleviate the potential impact, as an insurance policy, if you will.
If you do not take any action, you risk losing your digital customer base.
If you are an e-commerce company, you can retain purchasers, but what about users who went to your site but didn’t purchase? Your high value prospects are gone. What if you have a high low or no authentication business? Your digital customers are gone.
You can hope that Chrome ITP will not happen, the same way you can hope that driving without auto insurance means you won’t get into an accident.
This is better than doing nothing, as it will retain your digital customer data, but there are a few considerations.
Integrating with a third party identity provider has historically been seen as an easier way to adopt an identity solution, but it can be risky to build such a strategic foundation against an ID that is not your own, with technology that you can’t control.
What happens if that company goes out of business? What happens if that company gets acquired or goes through other M&A activity? This isn’t out of the realm of possibility, as we saw AppNexus pull out of the ID Consortium when their acquisition was announced, despite being one of the original domains that was to be perpetually licensed for the consortium.
This isn’t an accessory technology adding some bells and whistles; this is the underpinning for many different corporate uses and strategies. You wouldn’t put a $10,000 sound system in a Hertz rental car, would you? So why would you put your dev resources around a solution that you don’t own and control?
While it is the main purpose of many identity providers to provide this information, it can also be risky to rely on another party to determine the corresponding linkages of your customers, and few identity providers allow you to validate supply against your own verified truth set.
Even with 100% deterministic providers, do you have transparency into the individual suppliers of said linkages? Would you buy a car insurance plan if you didn’t know what it covered?
While recognized as the gold standard of identity management, standing up your own solution has historically been difficult to both build and maintain. This can be an intimidating task, with the question of where to even start. The good news is, it just got easier.
The first thing you should do is ensure your less stable data is “backed up” to a more stable ID. In the context of cookies, this means taking your current cookie data and mapping it to a MAID or a hashed email, ideally both.
Narrative does not provide the stable ID—that should be your own—but we do provide the ability to automate the collection of identity data, making a task that previously required outsourcing easily doable in-house.
Narrative enables you to:
Once you back up your less-stable cookie data to a more stable ID, your data is retained, buying you valuable time to both figure out the ideal internal identity strategy and roll with the ever-changing speculation of what third party cookie usability will actually look like in practice.
This is not building a cross-device mapping which will only organize you the relationship of one ID to another. This is not a cross-device graph which is simply a structure in which to make the data more retrievable. This is providing you the ability to retain your valuable first party data, no matter where it lives and in what form.
Learn how Narrative's Acquire platform can help you build your own native identity solution.