First-party Cookies

Cookies play an essential role in the modern internet. These small pieces of data stored in your web browser can do everything from saving login details to enhancing website performance to helping marketers show users products that they will love. However, not all cookies are made equal, and there are significant differences between first-party and third-party cookies.

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.

Google is coming for your cookies, and not the tasty kind lying safely in a tin in your kitchen, but the third-party ones that sit in your browser, watching, waiting, and storing all kinds of information. This has major implications, some good and some bad, for marketers and consumers alike. It also means that many of our old tools will soon become obsolete. However, you don’t need to crack open your tin of real cookies and start stress-eating yet. There are plenty of new tools on their way, one of which we’re going to get into today: The Protected Audience API.

Google proposed that instead of deprecating third-party cookies for all users in Chrome, they will let users decide whether to allow third-party cookies in the browser. Google also emphasized their continued investment in the Privacy Sandbox to ensure its performance and utility.

Digital advertising continues to evolve at a rapid pace, driven by technological advances, changing consumer behaviors, and shifting privacy regulations. We recently sat down with Jaysen Gillespie, Vice President of Global Product Commercialization at RTB House, to discuss IntentGPT, one of our most significant recent innovations. Gillespie has been instrumental in leading the development and commercial rollout of this technology, which represents a fundamental shift in how advertisers can understand and act on user intent across the web.