Tough Cookies: Google Is Keeping Cookies, So Now What?

All that planning and spending.

All that worrying and reevaluating.

All of it, and for what? To keep photographers who specialize in capturing laptops and baked goods in business?

Ever since Google first announced in 2020 that they’d be killing off third-party cookies, those tiny bits of data-collecting code that tracked user activity and helped customize Chrome browsing experiences, publishers and advertisers have been preparing for the looming cookieless future. And as the tech company rolled out initiatives like Privacy Sandbox while issuing continuous stays of execution over the years, companies responded by paying attention to — and lots of money for — alternative plans. Keeping up with the potential seismic shifts and the possible salvaging solutions was a full-time focus for publishers, advertisers, tech leaders, industry experts, bloggers, and those (like me) who’ve long been dead-center in the eye of that Venn diagram storm … and on Monday, Google said nevermind. 

 

Google Cookie U-Turn Could Be Another Meteor Heading For Publishers

The future funding of journalism on the open internet remains in question despite news that Google will not kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser after nearly five years of promising otherwise.

 

The SMB Channel Divide: Consumers And Businesses Are Split On Preferences

Consumers and small businesses are at odds over how marketing should be done, judging by The state of small business marketing in 2024, a two-part study by SimpleTexting. Of the consumers polled, 38% prefer receiving marketing communications from SMBs via email, while 34% cite social media as their preferred channel. 

 

Consumer Vision 2035: The Era of the Insight to Foresight Pivot

In the next decade technology will completely envelop our experience of reality. At the same time, constraints created by what’s happening with the environment and the global population will force [us] to re-examine tenets of our culture and how we think about economic growth. In response to these pressures, consumers will increasingly lean on their mood states when making their shopping decisions and expect brands to be able to anticipate their emotional states and offer proactive solutions.