What marketers should know about Google’s cookies about-face

livemint.com:

After a yearslong saga involving squabbles with the larger ad industry and regulators, Google is ending a plan to eliminate third-party tracking cookies on its Chrome browser. The marketing world is now trying to figure out how such tracking would fare if consumers have more choice to stop it. Four years ago, Google said it would phase out support for third-party cookies, which log the activity of internet users across websites so advertisers can target them with relevant ads and track the effectiveness of those ads.

The insights can be valuable to advertisers but have generated consumer privacy concerns. Instead of eliminating those third-party cookies, Google will present users with a prompt to decide whether to retain third-party cookies, according to the U.K. competition regulator that has been overseeing the search giant’s plan to block cookies, leaving marketers to wonder how that will work, and how they will reach consumers if they opt out en masse.

Here’s what marketers should know about Google’s change and what could come next. Google first announced its intention to phase out third-party cookies in 2020. Privacy advocates were enthusiastic, but many advertisers objected, saying Google’s plan to replace cookies would force them to shift spending to its digital-ad products.

What followed was years of delays and disagreements with the industry and regulators. “Google was being pulled in multiple directions. The company had to thread the needle between offering a more privacy-centric approach to web browsing while not disrupting the ad tech ecosystem to the point that antitrust concerns could be raised," Raymond James analysts wrote in a research note this week.