Google has eased off the gas on deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome, and I’m encouraged that publishers and advertisers are mostly still moving forward on alternatives. The bigger risk is what happens with the extra time. With billions of dollars of ad-tech shareholder value on the line, there’s enormous pressure to iterate on the status quo when what we need is a rethink.
Most of the next-gen identity proposals on the table are still anchored to a semi-permanent underlying identifier — an email address, a device fingerprint — and they still travel through the bidstream. That makes it structurally hard for the parties with actual consumer relationships (publishers and advertisers) to keep their privacy promises.
Context and cohorts are the lion’s share opportunity
Reality check: only about 5% of non-platform inventory is reliably addressable through deterministic, persistent identifiers. Yet most of the industry conversation is fixated on that 5%. The other 95% runs on contextual advertising and its smarter cousin, privacy-safe cohorts.
This isn’t third-party keyword targeting and it isn’t Google FLoC. It’s publisher-driven audience segmentation, enabled by consent, built from the publisher’s own first-party signals — now standardized and scalable thanks to taxonomy work from IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org.
Addressable, without sharing identity
For the use cases that genuinely need user- or device-level resolution — targeting, frequency capping, measurement — there’s a better path than handing personal data to the bidstream. Some market entrants are obfuscating identifiers behind single-use, encrypted tokens stored in the publisher’s and advertiser’s own first-party repositories. The buyer’s list talks to the publisher’s repository, matching records get tagged with a cohort ID, and only that cohort ID ever crosses the wire.
That’s decentralized, disaggregated identity by design. No personal data is shared between buyer, seller, or any intermediary. It takes more effort to build than “cookies with a new name,” but it stops data leakage at the root.
Use the gift
The cookie may be on borrowed time, but rebuilding it under a different label is not a strategy. Real progress means protecting the first-party relationships between consumers, publishers, and brands — the only relationships in the chain that are actually aligned. Take the high road, and treat Google’s delay as a gift to test, iterate, and perfect a more private future for digital advertising.
Originally published by AdExchanger in The Sell Sider.
Originally published on trustx.org.