Overcoming 3rd Party Cookie Demise

from 5 Top Customer Engagement Trends for 2023 & Beyond

Are you Really Delivering an Omnichannel Experience?

First-party data is the future of brand-consumer relationships builton trust - not just for advertising, but for all digital experiences.

Amit Ahuja, VP Experience Cloud Product & Strategy at Adobe

Marketing teams rely on third-party cookies for list segmentation, targeting, re-targeting, cross-site attribution modelling, personalisation, and campaign measurement. The wider business relies on these activities for lead generation and continuous improvement.

Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have already default blocked third-party cookies and iPhone users now have to opt-in.

Google is following suit in 2025 but is currently developing a new “Privacy Sandbox” solution, in a bid to remove the need for third-party data.

How Do Your Customers Feel About Third-Party Cookies?

Website visitors have no control over how this Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about their interests, preferences, browsing history and online behaviour is used nor any visibility into which businesses are processing it.

A Google blog from March 2021 acknowledged that 72% of internet users feel that advertisers are practically tracking their every move online and 81% think that the potential data breach risks and privacy invasion outweigh the benefits of personalized advertising.

How is Third-Party Cookies Depreciation Affecting Marketers?

So why is this our 2nd big trend for 2023 and beyond?

Well, the capabilities and efficacy of Privacy Sandbox are unknown and, given the delays so far, it’s release may be some way off.

A recent HubSpot survey showed that 41% of marketers are worried they’ll no longer be able to track the right data, whilst 44% predict a 5-25% increase in ad and other spending to achieve similar goals to 2021.

As we’ve seen above, consumers are voicing concerns about their data privacy. The savviest marketers are focused on creating customer intimacy by meeting and predicting customer expectations, so we believe they will get creative with zero-party, first-party and second-party data, and also rely more on Account Based Experience (ABX) like B2B marketers. To that end, 23% of marketers have already expressed their intention to focus more on email automation.