Written by Kylie Rosan, Head of Digital Media

It’s been several years now since we first started discussing the “cookieless future”. Many a deadline for the inevitable end of the third-party cookie has come and gone, so it’s unsurprising really that Google has now announced it will be keeping cookies in its Chrome browser.

Earlier this year, a final deadline was set as Google scrambled to balance the needs of the consumer, maintain privacy compliance, and consider the needs of the advertiser to better understand the consumer.

The answer finally announced: the cookie isn’t disappearing, and they’ll instead allow the user to make an informed choice to opt in or out around tracking.

Since the original 2020 announcement of the deprecation of the Chrome cookie, advertisers developed alternatives and marketers reduced their reliance on the third-party cookies to minimise the loss of critical data from Chrome that makes up more than half of the browser market in Australia. First-party data strategies have become a backbone of any good digital media campaign. In addition, the development of AI and platform technologies has provided data compliant signals for targeting audiences which continues to sharpen and generate results.

So what does the future have in store for third-party data? Well, there’s still a place for it. But we’ve moved on. It’s now simply one small tool in a very full toolbox. We’ve learned the most important data for generating results is the data we (and our clients) now own, not that of Google.