Retailers in a Cookieless World

 Have received several inquiries up this alley.

Will retailers be ready when the third-party cookies crumble?

@lelia_milaya via Twenty20

CONSUMER MARKETING DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING DIGITAL MARKETING IT CHALLENGES ONLINE RETAIL PRIVACY ISSUES SHOPPER ANALYTICS

Apr 13, 2022  by Tom Ryan

Eighty-one percent of companies are reliant on third-party cookies while 85 percent of consumers want brands to use only first-party data, according to Twilio’s “State of Customer Engagement Report.”

The global survey of 3,450 business leaders and 4,500 consumers further found that more than half (55 percent) of companies are not fully prepared for a cookieless world. Forty-two percent predict the impending changes will lead to lower return on investment on their marketing spend.

Google plans to start blocking cookies in Chrome, the dominant browser, by the end of 2023. Firefox and Safari are already doing so.

In a new study, McKinsey identified three strategies that can help companies prepare for the impending demise of third-party cookies as well as new opt-in requirements that restrict mobile-device identifiers for ad targeting.

Use their own consumer touchpoints to collect first-party data;

Create partnerships to leverage second-party data;

Experiment with contextual advertising, which displays ads based on the content a user is viewing, and explore the evolution of interest-based advertising, which targets consumers based on their recent top categories of interest.

McKinsey added, “Advertisers will also need to rethink how they approach measurement and attribution — the process of assessing the contribution of the advertising channels that lead customers to their website or app — given that Google’s cookie ban, Apple’s app-tracking-transparency policy, and evolving privacy-protection regulation will render some existing measurement and attribution methods obsolete.”

Capgemini wrote in a recent blog entry, “Solutions that help marketers to strengthen first party data, match and analyze first party data from any source, and expand overlaps for greater accuracy and scale while being agnostic of cloud and identity provider will empower data enrichment and identity resolution.”  ....' 

Is Google new Tracking replacing FLoC Beterr?

 FLoC is gone, now is the Google 'Topics' better? 

Google attacked over latest plan to replace tracking cookies

By Joel Khalili published about 5 hours ago in TechRadar

Google Topics does nothing to address core privacy concerns, says Brave

The company behind privacy-centric web browser Brave has hit out against Google’s latest plan to replace third-party cookies, which it says will do little to minimize the opportunity for violations of privacy.

Introduced earlier this week, Google Topics (a substitute for the controversial FLoC proposal) offers a way to serve up ads to people based on broad interest categories, such as travel or fitness, instead of using granular and often sensitive data hoovered up by cookies.

The system relies on three weeks’ worth of browsing data, which is stored locally on-device, to place people into a variety of different buckets, which in turn determine what types of ads the person will receive. Web users can opt out of any particular topic via their browser at any time.

According to Brave, however, Topics “only touches the smallest, most minor privacy issues in FLoC, while leaving its core intact”. The new proposal pays “lip service” to protecting the open web, but in reality is yet another tool designed to preserve the Google monopoly, the company claims.  .. '

Google Killing Off FloC

 Notable  How does this change the interaction with consumer, their privacy and 

Google Kills Off FLoC, Replaces It With Topics

By TechCrunch, January 25, 2022

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google's controversial project for replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into groups of users with comparable interests, is dead. In its place, Google today announced a new proposal: Topics.

The idea here is that your browser will learn about your interests as you move around the web. It'll keep data for the last three weeks of your browsing history and as of now, Google is restricting the number of topics to 300, with plans to extend this over time. Google notes that these topics will not include any sensitive categories like gender or race.

To figure out your interests, Google categorizes the sites you visit based on one of these 300 topics. For sites that it hasn't categorized before, a lightweight machine learning algorithm in the browser will take over and provide an estimated topic based on the name of the domain.

More

Google Changes How Ads Track People Around the Internet

Had been reported on some time ago, devil will be in the details as they emerge in context, 

Google Totally Changing How Ads Track People Around the Internet  By The Washington Post, June 18, 2021

It's a common sight: Ads from that time you Googled flights to Cancún, or visited Nike to look for new running shoes, following you around the Internet.

Much of that tracking is made possible by cookies — little bits of code that jump off websites and lodge themselves in your browser, allowing new sites you visit to see where you've been before. Facebook and Google, the two most profitable advertising companies in history, use cookies to show ads across the Web based on info gathered on their own sites and social media networks.

But that's all changing. Google has vowed to block cookies completely on its Chrome browser, which is used by around 70 percent of the world's desktop computer owners, by the beginning of 2022. The decision, announced last year, sent shock waves through the advertising world, which has maintained revenue from tracking is necessary to fund a largely free Web.

From The Washington Post

FLoC vs SWAN Tests Cookies for Browse Tracking

 Which have the higher potential for misuse? 

Online advertisers take on Google with their own third-party cookie alternative

Google has "FLoC"; these advertisers propose "SWAN."

D. Hardawar    @devindra  March 31st, 2021  in Engadget

When Google announced its plans to stop supporting third-party cookies for ads, a move away from tracking users based on their individual browsing history to create personalized ads, it was like a nuclear bomb for the online advertising industry. Yesterday, Google started officially testing its alternative solution, FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts)  , which anonymously serves ads to groups based on similar behavior. The major problem for the ad industry? FLoC is entirely Google's creation, which isn't exactly appealing to the company's competition in the space. So a group of online advertisers is proposing an alternative (with an appropriately cute name) of their own, SWAN, Bloomberg reports.   ... '

Considering the Post-Cookie Marketing World

 Have mentioned some other tracking methods being experimented with that could lead to dangerous erosion of Web privacy.  See for example: 'CNAME Collusion' tag link below.

Preparing for a post-cookie World:  Five Considerations for Marketers

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Chief Marketer Staff

In light of the pending demise of third-party cookies, it behooves marketers to prepare for a measurement landscape dependent upon consumer privacy laws, first-party data collection and new ID resolution solutions. Following are five ways marketers can stay ahead of the game, according to a piece in AdExchanger.  ... (continues) 

Google to Stop Tracking Users for Targeted Ads

Has long been done with cookies.  More recently has been more dangerously proposed via  'CName Collusion'  See:  https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/808?autostart=false    https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-808-Notes.pdf  ... 

Google to Stop Tracking Users for Targeted Ads  By The Hill   March 5, 2021

Google says it will no longer track users across Internet searches to sell targeted advertising, and will not build alternative user-tracking models.

The search engine giant last year pledged to phase out the use of third-party cookies within two years, as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative to develop standards to improve online privacy.

Google's David Temkin said this week that Google products will be powered by "privacy-preserving [application programming interfaces] which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers."

Temkin cited data Google issued in January demonstrating a method to "effectively" remove third-party cookies from advertising, by "clustering" communities with similar interests, rather than specific individuals.   ... '

Emergence of Trust Tokens

Google buys in, likely create more acceptance.

Google’s ‘trust tokens’ are here to take cookies down a peg
The company plans to eventually phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser

By Kim Lyons in TheVerge

Google said earlier this year it would join other web browser companies to block third-party cookies in Chrome, and today, developers have their first chance to test a proposed alternative to tracking users across the web: trust tokens.

Unlike cookies, trust tokens are designed to authenticate a user without needing to know their identity. Trust tokens would not be able to track users across websites, because they’re theoretically all the same, but they could still let websites prove to advertisers that actual users — not bots — visited a site or clicked on an ad. (An explainer on GitHub suggests that websites could issue multiple different kinds of trust tokens, though.)  ... " 

On the End of Tracking Cookies?

Quite a considerable change?  We analytically examined the use of Cookies early on.  Is this the end, and what are the implications?

R.I.P. Cookies. Why customer experience matters more than ever
Jean Belanger in CustomerThink

Marketing in the Internet age has seen several assumptions cast in stone:

1. Cookies: targeting and attribution has been fuelled by cookies, which were invented 25 years ago in 1994.
2. Ads: total US digital ad spending in 2019 was $130B, versus $110 billion for traditional ads.
3. Data: it was cool for brands to take the approach that ‘we have your data, and we can do what we want with it, as and when we see fit.’

Brands can track you, they can follow you across the web, they can target you with ads, if they are relevant – awesome. Therefore it comes as no surprise that traditional channels of communications – TV, radio, newspapers – are all giving way in our increasingly to digital lifestyles.

Meanwhile the Internet and smartphones are making us pickier and more informed than ever. But the natives are restless. We do not want to be tracked like animals in the jungle. We value our privacy more than we ever have done. My data and personal profile is mine, not yours. Where are our private property rights when we need them?

Google dropped its “cookie apocalypse” on the marketing industry earlier this month, when it announced that they will be phasing out the use of cross-website cookies, which have underpinned digital advertising for 25 years. They will also “obsolete” third-party cookies that follow internet users from site to site, and can trace their browsing for months and months.

Google’s move will drastically curb the ability of brands to extract private and sensitive insights about us. While the advertising industry has known for some time that third-party cookies are being consigned to history, slowly eliminating the basic concept of an open web that has dominated marketing matters for decades, Google’s news will totally disrupt the global digital advertising supply chain. ... "

Targeted Ads and Data Privacy

Surprising comments that there is still not clear understanding of what is required to comply. Thus the hundreds of checkboxes saying I understood that cookies where being used.  But not the details of how.

How Will Targeted Ads Fare in an Era of Data Protection?  in K@W

If targeted advertising needed indicators of both enormous growth and potential threats ahead, several recent events have been only too happy to oblige. On the one hand, this is the year mobile will edge out TV as the dominant advertising medium in the U.S., according to a forecast from eMarketer, just as Google continues to roll out products and services that make life and its logistics more seamless. On the other hand, the Cambridge Analytica episode has provided a cautionary tale in what can go wrong when a trusted tech giant like Facebook loses control over its users’ private data.

Another wild card has just begun to reveal itself. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect last month, granting individuals a greater degree of control over how firms gather, store and use their personal data. The GDPR was crafted by and for members of the European Union, but because commerce and data move freely across international borders, many firms in the U.S. and across the globe have decided to conform to its guidelines.

What exactly will it mean in the U.S.? Even the federal government appears to be unsure. “GDPR’s implementation could significantly interrupt transatlantic cooperation and create unnecessary barriers to trade, not only for the U.S. but for everyone outside the E.U.,” wrote U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross in the Financial Times. “We do not have a clear understanding of what is required to comply.” .... " 

“[GDPR] will force companies to take a closer look at their data infrastructure, much more so than they would otherwise — and we know it’s a big mess out there.”–Peter Fader ... "