The

Cookieless
World
2022 Update

A Follow-up to the
Guide for the New Era
of Digital Marketing

October 2022

Media // / /

Media // / /
© 2022 dentsu | all rights reserved
No Way Back

With the deprecation of third-party cookies firmly in motion, the last

twelve months have been particularly busy for brands as they face
critical technology decisions with deep ramifications throughout their
businesses.

In June 2021, dentsu released The Cookieless World - A Guide for the New Era
of Digital Marketing, a comprehensive deep-dive into the ongoing deprecation
of third-party cookies and what brands can do to prepare.

While the structural dynamics and the key recommendations described in that
report still hold true, a lot has happened over the last year, from new
regulatory debates to new announcements from technology platforms.

For this reason, we have taken a fresh look at how these recent changes
around the end of third-party cookies impact brands, and what brands should
consider doing to ensure business continuity.

In this addendum to the 2021 guide, we look into implications across Data
Management, Audience Activation, and Performance Measurement, following a
campaign’s progress from preparation to planning and targeting, to proving
effectiveness. We also offer a checklist of key considerations to help prepare
for the deprecation of third-party cookies.

We hope you will find this update useful in your journey to the cookieless
world.

To learn more about what the end of third-party cookies specifically means for
your business and how you can best prepare today, contact your dentsu Client
Partner or Rohan Philips, Global Product Officer, Media, dentsu international.

This report is for general information only, the contents of this

report are not intended to be legal advice and should not be used
as a substitute for legal or other professional advice.
Table of Contents

Data Management: Build Identity as Your New Foundation 4

Audience Activation: Test and Adapt, Ensuring Privacy Remains at the Forefront 7

Performance Measurement: Transparent and Accountable 10

A Checklist Preparing for the Deprecation of Third-party Cookies 13

The Cookieless World

Data
Management
 T he C ookieless World

Data Management

What has changed over the last twelve months? functionality. Increased adoption of the identity paywall
comes with better tracking of real identity that's higher
quality, legislation compliant, privacy safe, and more
The past 12 months have delivered exciting developments,
controllable.
and the industry is transitioning into to a cookieless world.
This is in the context of increasing privacy legislation where Increased adoption of data clean rooms and Google
Gartner estimates that 75% of the global population will Analytics 4 are helping brands leverage and combine more
have its personal data protected under modern privacy precise first-party data, allowing them to put customer
regulation by the end of 2024. privacy first while still realising its value.

In 2021, Google ignited conversation with a timeline for How does it impact brands?
C hrome’s deprecation of third-party cookies. While that
As reliance on third-party cookies fades, brands have been
timeline has been delayed, there is no doubt that this will
increasing their focus on first-party data and
be the eventual outcome. Beyond Google, over the last
increasingly more conversations about privacy and data
year, more browsers and operating systems have disabled
integrity across their organisations. Shifts in consumer
cookies or provided choice by not allowing cookies by
privacy legislation will help keep this topic front and center
default. Moreover, consumers are increasingly rejecting
across all business operations, and if thoughtfully responded
cookies across the web, and third-party cookies continue to
to can better equip brands for unexpected privacy and
erode.
compliance announcements in the future.
In exchange models, publishers have found new and
As brands look for new cookieless marketing tactics, they
creative ways to trade content for increased identity and
are exploring new value and consent-based loyalty
are giving away paid content to logged-in users. Logged-in
programs to scale first-party data collection, find and
user data has enabled brands to deliver their most valued
engage new customers, and fuel future growth. To further
assets to consumers through personalised, richer
enrich their audience segments, brands continue to
experiences in a way that feels authentic and seamless. In
enhance first-party cookie data by blending it with valuable
contrast, unauthenticated users may receive a lite
second- and third-party data sources.
experience that offers a subset of content and website

Privacy protection for consumers is gaining

momentum and far from consistent across the globe

EU
General Data
Protection
Regulation (GDPR)
China
Personal
Canada Information
Bill C-11 for the Digital UK Protection
Charter Implementation Data Protection Law (PIPL)
Act 2020 (DCIA) Act and UK
USA GDPR Japan
California Consumer Privacy Act Amendments to
California Privacy Rights Act the Act on the
Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act Protection of
Colorado Privacy Act Personal
Connecticut Data Privacy Act India
Personal Data Information
Utah Consumer Privacy Act
Brazil (APPI)
Protection Bill
Lei Geral de
(PDP)
Preotecao de
Dados (LGPD)
Australia
Online
Privacy Act New Zealand
South Africa
Online Privacy
Protection of
Act 2020
Personal
Information Act
T he C ookieless World

Data Management

While diversifying and combining data sources in this way Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and marketing platform
is a powerful tool, implementing, using, and maintaining partners can provide valuable consumer insights. Evaluate
the underlying technologies is complex. Brands will need second-party data partnerships, new technologies, and
to find new ways to blend diverse data sources and resources to reach your audience with precision.
leverage solutions like identity graphs (ID graphs). ID
Consideration #2: Build identity as your new
graphs are databases that securely store and stitch
foundation
together multi-source customer data to create a unified
customer profile from their first-party data without relying People-based identity solutions integrate first- and
on third-party cookies. ID graphs enable brands to deploy second-party cookie data across channels and devices,
better targeting, personalisation, measurement, and along with third-party data like demographics and
more, giving brands that use them a distinct advantage in psychographics. Dentsu's identity products create
the marketplace. incremental known customers and prospects by bringing
together disparate identifiers and enabling targeting and
personalisation across channels.
What brands should consider doing:
Consideration #3: Use clean rooms to maximise
customer data
Consideration #1: Explore new resources,
C lean rooms allow brands to connect their data and
partnerships, and technologies
collaborate with media and data partners globally, in a
Exploring and strengthening new and existing partnerships totally privacy centric way with no first-party data
(both internal and external) will help you reach and sharing. They enable audience insights, enrichment,
delight your customers most profitably in the cookieless creation and activation use cases across owned and paid
world. A cross-disciplinary privacy team with clearly media. C lean rooms provide a data-safe and secure
defined roles and responsibilities can help brands set new environment for marketing, media and data science teams
guidelines for collecting, processing, retaining, and to collaborate efficiently. Maximising the value of your
deleting consumer data. Embracing modern, clear, and data assets enables universal use cases to facilitate better
concise consent management solutions for data collection customer experiences and can be achieved by working
gives consumers more control over their privacy, with a combination of partners based on geographical
increasing their likelihood to opt-in. Implementation of presence of your brand to get the most relevant data
consent management technology can actually be required partner in markets.
in some markets. C ustomer Data Platforms (C DPs),
The Cookieless World

Audience
Activation
T he C ookieless World

Audience Activation

What has changed over the last twelve months? stating consistent feedback they received on the need for
more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox
technologies.
While we have not seen any major shake ups this year –
surely nothing like what was caused by App Tracking While not yet officially announced, Digiday broke the news
Transparency, cookie deprecation (e.g., Safari), or privacy about Apple building a demand-side platform (DSP). The
updates in previous years – we have seen universal IDs leak can be traced to recent job listings paired with new
continue gaining traction, a few new announcements of advertising opportunities within the App Store.
note from Google, and a continued focus on emerging (or
renewed) options for activation.
How does it impact brands?
Universal IDs allow AdTech companies a cookieless way to
identify users across websites and devices. Alternative IDs
will need to be monitored in line with regulations across While recent announcements do lend brands additional
markets. And, while adoption has been slow, solutions like time, they should not shift current focus away from the
UID2.0 from The Trade Desk continue to gain importance of first-party data and consumer identity,
traction. UID2.0 officially became open source in late Q2 especially since the value of a cookie has already been
2021 and since then has attracted companies across the lessened through the deprecation on iOS, Safari, and
programmatic supply chain, ranging from ad technology, Firefox. Nor should these delays usher in complacency or
publishers and advertisers. be seen as an indication that Google will not make good
on this commitment. Rather, the latest delay will allow
Google announced in early 2022 that they would be
brands more time to prepare for cookie deprecation and
abandoning their FLoC (Federated Learning of C ohorts)
establish a range of tried-and-true alternatives to third-
interest targeting initiative in favor of a new initiative
party cookies.
called Topics. With the new initiative, 350 targetable
topics will be identified, and Google’s API will categorise
each website based on the identified topics. And as we’ve
mentioned, Google also announced a second delay in
C hrome phasing out cookies (now targeting 2H 2024)
T he C ookieless World

Audience Activation

What brands should consider doing: different legislative jurisdictions and ensuring test and
adapt strategies are nuanced will ensure scalability of
these programmes in the future.
Consideration #1: Continue prioritising first-party
data

C onsiderable effort should continue to be placed on Consideration #3: Revitalise contextual targeting
collecting and enriching consented first-party data and
C ontextual targeting enables brands to display ads
working to improve internal data management ecosystems
tailored to the page's content without relying on cookies
to better connect, deploy, and extract value from data
or past activity. New tools and solutions in the market
assets ensuring recency maintained and data loss
allow for web- or ID-based signals to inform a more
mitigation strategies are in place. Working with a range of
refined and scalable contextual approach (i.e., Google
locally relevant data partners can ensure consistent and
Topics and dentsu C ontextual Intelligence).
ongoing enrichment of first-party data assets. This will be
the backbone of any ID-based solution in the future, and In the immediate term, brands should add contextual to
key for increasing consumer lifetime value. their test and learn plans, compare the results with
traditional tactics, and implement the right mix of
contextual and first-party data activations based on data
Consideration #2: Test and adapt strategies, availability and the roles of these activations across
ensuring privacy remains at the forefront holistic full funnel brand and performance strategies.

Monitor and test alternative solutions taking stock in the

delivery, the return, and the tradeoffs that exist compared
to cookies (e.g., scale, complexity, transparency, fidelity,
etc.). C ontinue to push for new advancements in this
space and partnering across the ecosystem to ensure that
privacy remains at the forefront of all data-driven
marketing activities. Identifying the right partners in
The Cookieless World

Performance
Measurement
T he C ookieless World

Performance Measurement

What has changed over the last twelve months? How does it impact brands?

The industry has reacted swiftly to privacy regulations To continue activating efficient and effective campaigns, it
over the past year, with the twofold aim of improving is hard not to get on board with these technological
capture of observable conversions and more accurately changes. However, we are seeing an increased demand
modelling unobservable conversions. for measurement and technology practitioners to work
together to build elegant solutions such as lifetime value
To effectively capture data at source, partners have
bidding, DDA-based activation (Data-driven Attribution),
introduced updated solutions for robust and consistent
and lead-quality optimisation.
tagging, more accurate conversion attribution, and signal
enrichment. Many partners have also rolled out solutions This increased prevalence of aggregated and modelled
which leverage statistical and machine learning techniques data driven by the fragmentation of the media and privacy
to predict conversions. For example, Google, Meta, landscape means that brands are finding it increasingly
Pinterest, and other partners have introduced behavioural difficult to get their hands on the data they are used to
modelling which allows advertisers to accurately report on having. Furthermore, precise, consistent, and unbiased
conversions, even in the case where there are limited data across different markets and platforms is harder to
observed signals. obtain.

This more accurate and comprehensive modelling helps to For this reason, it has never been more important to
offset the signal loss caused by Intelligent Tracking establish a bespoke measurement framework for your
Prevention (ITP), iOS 14.5, and GDPR. Some of these brand. In most cases this requires multiple measurement
partners have phased out solutions where data capture techniques working together to validate and calibrate each
and model accuracy might be compromised, like Facebook other.
Attribution, and Google Universal Analytics, to make way
The holy grail is the Hybrid Measurement Model, where
for the refined updates.
data-driven attribution, marketing mix modelling, and
incrementality testing work together via triangulation to
produce a fast-moving performance measurement model.
This model, used in conjunction with data clean rooms and
increased media partner transparency, is vital for a
successful measurement approach.
T he C ookieless World

Performance Measurement

What brands should consider doing: By leveraging publisher clean rooms such as Google’s Ads
Data Hub (ADH) or Amazon Marketing C loud (AMC ),
clients can perform advanced in-channel analysis and
Consideration #1: Measurement Triangulation
devise further experiments to calibrate their Hybrid Model.
One of the challenges of the Hybrid Model is reconciliation Further, the evolution of solutions, such as Google
of conflicting measurement results. Incrementality testing Analytics 4, presents effective – and privacy compliant –
can be used to validate the outputs of both Multi-Touch ways for cookieless measurement and modelling to
Attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), augment agency and advertiser tools.
whereas a scaled test and learn programme can
Consideration #3: Transparent and Accountable
systematically recalibrate custom attribution models.
Measurement
Where digital upper funnel activities make up most of the
budget, long-term impact can be better measured by Google and Meta have both released several notable
regression-based attribution. open-source packages in the marketing science realm,
focused on incrementality testing, regression-based
Consideration #2: The Case for Adaptation to New
attribution and MMM. Rather than facing accusations of
Solutions
marking their own homework, they have provided tools for
As we embark on cookieless people-based advertising, brands to create their own Hybrid Models. Whether you
clean rooms allow for privacy-compliant match-backs of ad choose to leverage these or build your own, there are now
exposure with client business and brand health outcomes. ample opportunities to own your measurement stack.

Data-Driven
Attribution

Hybrid
Measurement
Model

Marketing Incremental
Mix Modelling Testing
The Cookieless World

A Checklist
Preparing for the
Deprecation of
Third-party
Cookies
T he C ookieless World

A Checklist Preparing for the Deprecation of

Third-party Cookies

BUSINESS ACTIVITY CONSIDERATIONS KEY QUESTIONS

• What is the real c ons umer perc eption of our value

exc hange? I s it the s ame in every region?
• H ow does the data we c ollect improve the c ustomer
experience?
Consumer focus • D o we c ommunicate c learly to c onsumers on privac y
Evaluate your data value exchange. matters ? What are the c ultural nuances?
• D o we appropriately c ollect any necessary c onsumer
c ons ents?
• D o we provide required information to c onsumers on our
us e of c ookies?
• Why do we c ollect data? For what s pec ific bus iness
purpos es?
Business focus
• Whic h types of the data we c urrently c ollect are c ritical?
Understand the place of data in
• H ow do we us e data ac ross our marketing initiatives?
your marketing. • What is the rec ency of the data and how c an all bus iness
ac tivities both leverage and enrich these as sets?

• H ow muc h of the c urrent investment is foc used on

DATA audienc es? On remarketing tac tics and s trategies? On
Media focus
MANAGEMENT s imilar audiences? O n third- party audiences?
Measure your reliance on third-
• What data do our c urrent media partners us e?
party cookies. • H ow muc h do we rely on our own vs . media partners ' data
for ac tivation?
• What c an we do to nurture our exis ting firs t -party data
s ets ? I s our c urrent c ookie data integrated with c ustomer
Data focus has hed pers onally identifiable information?
Develop alternative data sources to • Whic h are the mos t relevant partnerships for s ecuring
third-party cookies. ac c ess to quality s econd-party data?
• A re we working with loc ally relevant partners? Are there
any gaps in our data footprint?

• H ave we optimis ed our c urrent tech s tack?

Technology focus
• I s our s tac k future-proofed (e.g., c an our C D P c onnect with
Define use cases to drive
A dT ech vendors without third-party c ookies)?
technology investments. • A re c lean rooms adapted to our needs ?

• A re we making the mos t of the trans ition period to fully

tes t the different alternatives available (e.g., individual
brows er s olutions, c losed ec osystems, direc t publisher
Test and learn focus
ec os ystems)?
Test your partners' cookieless • I s an I D better than c ontextual for us ? What is the pric ing
alternatives. model? Whic h c an we s c ale easily?
• Should we deploy C ontextual vs. I D s trategies for different
AUDIENCE
types of ac tivation? What is the right mix?
ACTIVATION
• D o we leverage c ontextual targeting to its full potential?
Media focus
• A re we us ing c ontext s ignals to optimise our c reatives?
Reassess your non-audience-based
• What s afeguards (e.g., ad verific ation) do we have in place
targeting strategy. to protec t our brand?

• What KP I s are affec ted by c hanges and what are the ones
we s hould foc us on in the future?
Business focus • What do the KP I trends tell us about the impact to date?
Review your KPIs. • What gaps c an we c urrently obs erve between walled
garden reporting s olutions and our exis ting measurement
tools ?

• What are our c urrent s ources of truth to meas ure

performanc e?
• H ave we explored s olutions beyond attribution s uch as
PERFORMANCE Data focus
inc rementality testing and media mix modelling?
MEASUREMENT Evaluate your measurement mix. • D o we have the right mix of fas t and s low moving metric s
and models and are they integrated into our ways of
working? C an we ac t on them?

• D o we have the right expertise to build a rigorous and

ac tionable testing programme (i.e., to obtain s tatistically
Process focus
valid res ults to inform investment decisions)?
Build a robust testing roadmap. • D o we have the right res ourc es in plac e to quickly pivot
our audienc e activation bas ed on learnings from tes ts?
Contributors

Dan Calladine, Keith Camoosa, Samantha De Caprio, Paul Jacobsen,

Akash Jairath, Aurélien Loyer, El Kanagavel, Cristina Kimmel, Ana Pak,
Rohan Philips, Dan Stubbs, Maggie Summers, Bruce Williams

About dentsu international

Part of Dentsu Group, Dentsu International is a network designed for

what’s next, helping clients predict and plan for disruptive future
opportunities and create new paths to growth in the sustainable economy.
Dentsu delivers people-focused solutions and services to drive better
business and societal outcomes. This is delivered through five global
leadership brands - Carat, Dentsu Creative, dentsu X, iProspect and
Merkle, each with deep specialisms.

Dentsu International’s radically collaborative team of diverse creators

unifies people, clients and capabilities through horizontal creativity to help
clients create culture, change society, and invent the future.

Powered by 100% renewable energy, Dentsu International operates in

over 145 markets worldwide with more than 46,000 dedicated specialists,
and partners w ith 95 of the top 100 global advertisers.

www.dentsu.com

Contact

For further information please contact:

Rohan Philips
Global Product Officer, Media, dentsu international
[email protected]

For media inquiries please contact:

John Mayne
Global External Communications Lead, Media, dentsu international
[email protected]

This report is for general information only, the contents of this report are not intended to be legal advice and should not be used
Media
as / professional
// for legal or other
a substitute / advice.

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© 2022 dentsu | all rights reserved