In early 2021, Apple upended the mobile app ecosystem with a simple prompt: would users allow an app to track their mobile behavior across apps and websites or not? Called App-Tracking Transparency (ATT), the feature allows users to, with the tap of a button, request to not be tracked, a headwind worth billions to companies like Meta and Snap, which had built their businesses around tracking users for mobile advertising.
A little over three years later, Google appears to be taking a page from Apple’s playbook.
This week, the world’s biggest advertiser shocked the industry with a blog post declaring that it would pivot away from its years-long plan to deprecate third-party cookies within the world’s most popular browser, Chrome. Instead, the company detailed, it will simply ask users whether or not they want them.
“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Google’s Anthony Chavez proposed in the post.
Whether consumers approach any Chrome browser prompt the same way they did on iPhones remains to be seen, but ad-tech executives told Marketing Brew the announcement still likely spells out the end of the cookie—only this time, it will be at the hands of everyday users, not Google.
“We as an industry have to acknowledge that consumers hate the way we use their data, and given the choice, they will overwhelmingly say no,” Joe Root, co-founder of the publisher-focused ad-tech company Permutive, told Marketing Brew.
It’s a dynamic that’s already happening in slow-motion. The month ATT was introduced in iOS, opt-in rates hovered about 26% per app across nearly 550 apps, according to AppsFlyer, and today, 70% of consumers aren’t tracked by cookies, either because they’ve blocked cookies themselves or are using a browser like Safari that blocks them, according to Permutive’s data.
Cookies crumble
Third-party cookies, small bits of code that help advertisers track users across the open web, help underpin a roughly $180 billion programmatic advertising market that keeps the lights on for hundreds of thousands of websites. In recent years, there was a growing consensus among privacy advocates that cookies were invasive, and in 2020, Google said it would get rid of them entirely, though the company repeatedly missed self-imposed deadlines to do so.
In place of cookies, Google introduced an initiative called Privacy Sandbox, which it has pitched as a way to effectively preserve the mechanisms of online advertising while protecting user privacy. Almost immediately, it faced scrutiny, with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opening an antitrust investigation in 2021. In the meantime, Sandbox’s rollout has been bumpy, and in multiple tests, including those run by Google, publishers lost money.
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
Google’s proposed updated approach comes with a host of unknowns, including what exactly “elevated choice” looks like. Chrome already gives users the ability to opt-out of cookies—although they have to dig through their browser settings to find it.
Instead of pulling the plug on cookies themselves, “Google is putting the final death knell in the hands of consumers,” Root said.
Devil in the details
Ad-tech executives are waiting to see what Google’s specific prompt to users might look like, as well as how often users will be asked, whether they’ll be asked to accept cookies on every site they visit, and if opting out will be presented as a toggle within the Chrome browser. A Google spokesperson declined to provide details to Marketing Brew.
“The details will determine if the opt-out rate is 10% or 90%, and that’s really going to make a huge difference on the landscape moving forward,” Ari Paparo, an ad-tech vet who co-founded ad-tech company Beeswax, told Marketing Brew. “It could eliminate the majority of third-party cookies on Chrome.”
Meanwhile, the whiplash brands and advertisers feel from years of uncertainty about the cookie’s future has been “painful,” Wayne Blodwell, co-founder and CEO of Impact Media, an AI-powered ad platform, told Marketing Brew.
“It’s very hard for publishers and brands to plan,” he said. “It’s like, you buy a car, and you’re not sure whether the roads will shut down tomorrow.”
Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative is presumably not going anywhere, and Google’s Chavez wrote that the company would “continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.”
Index Exchange, a supply-side platform, has been testing Privacy Sandbox and sharing its results with regulators, and CEO Andrew Casale said the company’s roadmap remains unchanged.
If Google had done what Apple did and “deprecated the third-party cookie full stop, with no solution for addressability, with no solution for attribution,” the results would have been “far worse” for advertisers, Casale told us.
As for what’s next, Apple’s approach may be the precedent for the industry—for better or worse.
“User choice is the pivot,” Casale said.