Google’s decision to abort its retirement of third-party cookies from Chrome is kind of like President Biden’s decision to withdraw his candidacy for president. It is a massive fundamental shift in direction, but at the same time it is really not surprising at all.

In its announcement, Google indicated that though cookies will remain, it will take steps to ensure that consumers have more control over their personal data, yet telegraphing that data collection will be more difficult for the adtech industry. Combined with other privacy-related developments, this will pressure the quantity and velocity of user data in the adtech ecosystem. But that loss of signal will now be a steady and manageable decline, rather than a cliff.

Google’s plan to retire cookies has inspired a lot of innovation over the last four years, and there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. There are new, privacy-safe technologies like Dstillery’s ID-free® behavioral targeting in the market, and the overall trend toward higher privacy standards, if it continues, will open up opportunities for those that perform to thrive, regardless of the continued existence of cookies.

A collective sigh of relief

That said, I suspect that brands and their agencies are breathing a collective sigh of relief. The transition from cookies to something else was always going to be hard, and messy.

Media agencies are enormous, distributed and complex operations, and their workflows, partners and tools all had to adapt. Scale of the alternatives was a question. Some of the alternatives, like probabilistic IDs, had problematic privacy credentials of their own. And measurement was going to be challenging. Brand KPIs were going to break. Essentially, the fabric of the programmatic ad industry needed to be rewoven.

Media agencies had little control over this process, and not much choice. Like the adtech industry, they were being forced to adapt to the agenda of a large and powerful industry platform. The industry had done an admirable job preparing for this future, and had invested significant brain power, people hours and dollars to make this transition.

Despite all of that investment, there was still a great deal of uncertainty about how exactly this transition would unfold. The risks, uncertainties and operational challenges that accompanied cookie retirement from Chrome, and the headaches that created for media agencies, can now be pushed to the back burner.

Rebalancing our attention

From Dstillery’s perspective, we recognize the magnitude of this shift in the industry’s agenda.

We said at the beginning of this year that 2024 for our industry would be a year like no other, and that the only thing we knew for sure was that there would be a lot of change. From the halfway point of the year, it has lived up to its billing.

Dstillery is uniquely positioned, in that we can provide highly effective targeting solutions with or without IDs, and we are rebalancing our attention across our portfolio.

Our cookie-based audiences continue to deliver best in class performance, and we see opportunities to invest in new types of seeds, new modes of activation, new modeling technologies, and new distribution. Our ID-free targeting provides privacy-safe targeting solutions for parts of the market where that is important, and through our Predictive Bidding actually drives superior scale and performance to even our best cookie audiences.

Together, our ID-based and ID-free targeting solutions can fulfill the targeting needs of our programmatic partners and advertisers, with or without cookies, and we are excited for the new opportunities that this most recent shift will bring.