In the run up to the disappearance of third-party cookies, agencies and tech companies have been testing new privacy-conscious alternatives including Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, Google’s Privacy Sandbox, clean room technology and proprietary, bespoke solutions. Ultimately, it’s not likely there’s a single solution.

“By now most folks have gotten a clear understanding of what is changing and why. I think it makes sense for our industry to lead the way in respecting user privacy while ensuring that high quality content, audiences and advertising is mutually beneficial,” says Brian Cuddy, SVP digital and performance media for Plus Company. “Google certainly is not obliged to solve this for the industry, and we are supportive of their ongoing work with the Privacy Sandbox and in collaboration with the UK Competition and Markets Authority.”

Cuddy says that given the changing landscape around privacy, as well as impending legislation, like Law 25 in Quebec, the digital advertising ecosystem must evolve. “It is clear that an open broadcast of personal information to data aggregators, resellers and potentially bad actors, creates a scenario for abuse. In strengthening privacy-preserving advertising functions for the industry, Google can help advertisers, agencies and publishers connect more directly and grow their collective businesses.”

He says that advertisers need to focus their energy on relevant solutions. To further this, Plus Company is helping clients navigate changes to major platforms and unpacking modelled platform solutions as well as working with publishers and content creators on how best to value and monetize their audiences more directly.

In addition, Plus Company has built a proprietary system to help prove and improve the value of marketing impact. AIOS, the All-In-One-System, is powered by generative AI and predictive intelligence with no reliance on cookies or personal identification in any way.

Kristin Wozniak, global lead, SVP of customer success for Plus Company, says, “With AIOS, we synthesize aggregate and user-level demographic, conversion and exposure data to rebuild person-level journeys, and then use AI to fill in any data gaps. The result is that journeys become a synthetic data set. This is the moment where we can challenge the way in which we measure, plan, and optimize marketing, throwing old assumptions out the window. . . and imagining a world where new innovation can help us answer the previously unanswerable questions.”

The end result of the innovation and testing will be solutions that are not direct replacements for cookies – but will likely be more effective and privacy-safe. There won’t be a one-size fits all solution.

“I think the first mistake people make is to expect one solution to completely replace cookies to be exactly like cookies with the same capabilities for targeting and for measurement,” says Caroline Bergeron, SVP digital media and data at Horizon Media. “The future is not going to look like what we’ve seen so far and that might not be bad thing. It forces us to rethink how we approach targeting and personalization and measurement.”

Bergeron says cookie deprecation really started about four years ago with Firefox and Safari and the elimination of cookies from the Chrome browser is really the last step. “What we’ve been doing, at least at Horizon, is having conversations with our clients about the importance of building their first-party data.”

She adds that partnerships are important.

Instead of selecting a single tech vendor, Bergeron says the agency is approaching the cookie issue from a collaboration standpoint and has introduced Blu, its proprietary audience collaboration platform, to Canada. “We completely overhauled it for the Canadian market and we’re working with Optable, the data collaboration company. It provides us with connections with identifiers, alternative identifiers like UID 2.0. It also allows us to do things in a Google Privacy Sandbox to connect with publishers, for audience matching and for measurement.”

Kieran Miles, chief strategy office of Essencemediacom Canada, says there’s a lot of talk about the fear of the unknown with the depreciation of cookies but he believes it’s actually an exciting moment that’s bringing the industry back to the foundations of marketing and finding creative solutions to problems to drive growth.

Miles says, “What we’re talking about is good, strategic planning – understanding the audience data we have, understanding the data other people have access to and consent for to help better define audiences, and understanding consumer behaviours, mindsets, journeys. And we’ve got the tests to prove that this approach, while more involved, can beat cookie-fuelled executions. The death of the cookie isn’t a bad thing, there’s nothing to fear – this is a real celebration of marketing, of the skill of marketers, and the real value we all bring to brands.”

Data science company Arima specializes in synthetic data, building audience segments, conducting media measurement and finding business insights based on algorithmically-generated data, instead of personally identifiable information or trackers. Its Marketing Mix Modelling tool combines live market mix modeling, consumer insights discovery and media planning tools into one source.

Both Google and Meta have also jumped into Marketing Mix Modelling. The reason says Chris Williams, Arima’s chief marketing officer, is that cookies don’t work for what the advertiser needs. “The best media planning data includes a strong return path signal about the advertisers sales or customer acquisitions. To plan all media, you need a signal across all media. MMM does that; cookies do not.”

Williams says ID replacements for cookies only work within addressable media, and ideally addressable IDs work with analogue media as well. He says it is a huge opportunity for TV, radio, print and OOH to level the playing field and create a cross-media planning data structure. “If the industry wants to support domestic media, it needs to wake up to this opportunity while the transition away from third-party cookies happens. Measurement and targeting are the same thing so as measurement dives into the use of synthetic data or virtual IDs to deduplicate across different media vendors, we can head in the opposite direction using virtual IDs to target across multiple vendors. Virtual IDs are being used in the UK, U.S., Australia and Canada.”