Every day while scrolling on social media or reading news, we see articles about cookie-less future and its impact on the advertising industry. Even more often we find questions about how the business will look like and what should be done ASAP.

We decided to ask our colleagues to share their opinion on the trend and some thoughts on what the future of the media ecosystem may look like.

Thank you, Michał Witkowski, Junior Customer Success Manager at Roqad, for presenting your view on the topic.

Q. What do you think was the basis of cookie-less movement in the world? And what caused such a strong focus on data privacy in the last few years?

A. Data leakages, publishers exploiting their readers for data selling without consent, or even an outbreak of events that might have caused the election of the current President of the USA… That all must have resulted in some form of events chain, right? At first people might have been wondering what all this fuss is about, but then, slowly, something started to clear up.

So, at first we had the GDPR coming, and then California Consumer Privacy Act. After this there was the Safari ITP updates/ Chrome/ Firefox updates, and now the major shift – cookie-less future concept. I believe, the cookies are on the verge of vanishing in the near future, and that may be the beginning of real impacts for brands, publishers and everyone in between.

Ultimately, it will reshape the entire advertising ecosystem and the way in which brands engage with customers.

Q. What are the most crucial difficulties in the industry you see coming because of this?

A. As the first problem, I would name cookies being not stable. It means that a device will be represented only by 1 request instead of many requests as it is now. In general, the higher the number of requests, the better we can predict some potential users behaviours.

Blocked tracking is another issue. This implies that web trackers will be blocked by default on all commonly used browsers. It will protect users from many websites, analytics companies, and advertisers that want to follow their journey across the web.

Q. Is there any fast solution? Or what would be the options to overcome the difficulties?

A. Let me go back for a second here. For someone who isn’t familiar with our Identity Graph – Roqad is connecting anonymised IDs based on behavioural data, created in the form of an “event”. For example, a website was visited, ad impression was delivered in the app, etc. and then based on that the Roqad graph is built.

Therefore, I believe we are in a good position. As when facing the problem of ID’s instability our graph could serve as a tool which could solve the problem of unstable cookies in the cookie-less era.

Roqad ID could technically work as a stitching ID, because of its stability for users in a cookie-less environment. (For more detailed information about Roqad Identity Graph, check the link).

Q. How would you describe a cookie-less future in a few words?

A. Well – to sum it up – the future of advertising will change as cookies crumble, technology evolves and data privacy concerns reach a boiling point – that’s for sure. In my opinion, for brands and advertisers to be successful in the new world, they must remodel their approach on user experiences.

Also, they should seriously consider the advantages of data ownership. Now is the time to drive forward a unified advertising and marketing architecture to power future marketing initiatives. Many market players including DSPs, DMPs, CDPs, etc. will be impacted, so for sure some solutions and workarounds might be found.

We are more than happy to discuss how Roqad solutions could improve your businesses and to answer all your questions!