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As we collectively wade into 2024—crafting budgets, plans and strategies for the year ahead—there are two events for which we must prepare: cookie deprecation and the U.S. elections. If they don’t get their plans in place now, political campaigns and brand advertisers will be left scrambling for impressions in the middle of the $10 billion 2024 election cycle.
The industry has been sounding alarm bells for years now, warning advertisers and publishers that third-party cookies will be a thing of the past and that identity-based solutions are the way forward. After all, when advertisers can’t identify users, they tend to bid 50% less for an impression; as a result, publishers could lose up to $10 billion in ad revenue when third-party cookies are deprecated, per McKinsey.
The challenge is not a lack of awareness, nor is it a lack of preparation—ad-tech groups of all sizes have been working to construct cookieless identity graphs since Google announced the Privacy Sandbox back in 2019. The challenge, rather, is a lack of collaboration within the industry, which is encouraging fragmentation and inciting an absence of meaningful scale for our advertisers and publishers.
This is particularly worrisome in 2024, when the stakes are high and reaching voters is crucial.
As many DSPs can see through bidstream data, cookieless ID volume by a single company is still unstable. No singular graph nor targeting mechanism is going to provide a one-size-fits-all approach. If independent tech providers continue to operate in silos, when third-party cookies vanish, advertisers will be forced to work with each of their partners as though it’s a walled garden—unable to compare data across campaigns and limiting their ability to scale audiences in the advertising ecosystem.
Alternatively, if we rely solely on contextual solutions, we are limiting our deterministic view of the audience.
With cookies set to fully deprecate in Chrome in the third quarter of 2024—mere weeks before U.S. Election Day—everyone from smaller, niche political campaigns to presidential candidates will be feeling the squeeze, struggling to reach their constituents and voters. When every impression, every touch point and every identifier counts, we cannot rely on unscalable solutions.
