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Prep the flower arrangements. Advertisers are anticipating that IP addresses may soon go the way of the third-party cookie—that is, if the third-party cookie actually goes anywhere.
“The reality is that the third-party cookie is on its last legs, and the IP address will likely be obfuscated,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said this week during a keynote at the TechLab’s annual summit in New York City. “We’re very clearly at the end of the beginning for both of those signals.”
IP addresses, as a refresher, can identify devices and, over time, give tech companies a pretty good guess as to who users are and what their online habits look like. In the name of user privacy, though, companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple have all taken steps to limit access to or obfuscate the signal.
While third-party cookie depreciation has long been expected, Google has kept kicking the can down the road, moving the deadline to remove third-party cookies from Chrome several times. As the industry has prepared to phase out the cookie, IP addresses have become a key signal that some ad tech companies have turned to as an alternative.
Alternative IDs, which have cropped up in advance of the cookie phaseout, use a variety of signals, including IP addresses, to connect advertisers with users, and some Alt-ID executives believe that the death of the IP address as a signal has been greatly exaggerated.
“Getting rid of IP addresses means rewriting the Internet Protocol, plain and simple,” Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of the identity company ID5, told Marketing Brew in February, adding that a massive change “isn’t around the corner.” (ID5, FWIW, sponsored the lanyards at the TechLab summit.)
Katsur, though, didn’t seem so sure, and seeing as he leads the trade body responsible for creating the standards and best practices used by the advertising industry, his opinion has some weight.
“Whether it’s the loss of the cookies or the IP address, or masking emails, the digital ad economy is undergoing an unprecedented and accelerated cycle of signal loss,” he said onstage. “Why or when the cookie or the IP address is being deprecated is not the point. The point is we must accept not only that it is happening—it has happened.”
“I think multiple forms of signal are going to come under pressure, either by regulators, or by Big Tech or both,” he told Marketing Brew after the keynote. “Until we’re realistic and honest with ourselves about that, you can’t solve the problem.”