As part of Google’s Learn With GMP series, our Sr. Director of Tech Consulting & Architecture, Jackie Saplicki, and Sr. Director of Enterprise Data Transformation, Kosta Demopoulos, hosted a webinar on how to identify realistic and effective solutions that respect consumer privacy and help catalyze your brand toward digital maturity. Together with Google’s Ads Privacy Specialist, Lisa Tanzosh, they dove into the steps needed toward building trust in the quality of data—complete with key considerations including the importance of taxonomy in creating a functional approach. In case you missed it, you can watch the full session below, or continue reading for the main takeaways.

A strong data foundation starts with control.

For every organization, reliable data systems and good decision-making go hand in hand. At its core, that’s exactly what building solid data foundations is about: ensuring that the information we have is accessible, timely, trustworthy and fit for purpose so we can take the right steps toward our business goals. But that doesn’t happen spontaneously. Instead, it hinges on our capacity to exercise control over the data we own.

A good first step to gaining that control is building a list of all known data sources, such as ad servers, buying platforms and analytics tools. Data lives in many different places, and we need to bridge that divide in order to access a complete view.

Once you’ve conducted that streamlining process, the next phase is establishing data standards and rigorous governance practices to assess the quality of the data. “We can do so by leveraging media buying platforms and Cloud infrastructure to understand how the data is being reported out, how we can automate pipeline ingestion, things of that nature,” says Saplicki. “Identify vulnerable or error-prone areas and ensure that they are protected and have the proper standardization around them.”

Data quality is critical. 

Proper data standardization means looking at the rules we’re using to make sure we’re off to a good start. And that includes how we’re naming things. “Solving the taxonomy challenge is a critical first step,” says Demopoulos. “A single error in an object taxonomy entry or in the glossary maintenance system will bring reporting issues, requiring manual effort to investigate the error and correct it.”

While it’s not always easy to have a full grasp of the relevance of taxonomy, the truth is this is the bedrock on which everything else is built—including all the steps that lead to more effective creative and cost-efficient campaigns. Working with Bayer, we built a highly complex but unified taxonomy that assists with analysis and provides a consistent data feedback loop. That way, the team was able to condense multiple sources of data into a single dashboard that empowered them to make optimization decisions with meaningful impact.

To build equally powerful taxonomy strings, take into account the different data sources and their specific terms and requirements. While doing so, consider future changes in the market or even within the organization. If done right, you’ll reap the rewards of this effort for years to come; and if you are ever faced with the need to make changes, minimize the risk by doing so during downtime. 

Earning the trust of your organization.

A solid data foundation with impeccable taxonomy doesn’t only lead to good reporting, it also provides a common language for everyone to rely on. Especially when collaborating with external partners or even as new hires join the team, data that is labeled and structured becomes accessible to the entire organization.

After all, no single team is fully responsible for the data transformation program that building a solid data foundation requires. It spans data, tech, people, marketing, processes and more. Initially, putting together a series of use cases can be incredibly potent to get the buy-in from different stakeholders. As time goes by, trustable and transparent data will keep them on board. 

Overall, data foundations yield unified data sets in an organized, secure environment. If you want to improve the performance of your content campaigns and access advanced solutions such as machine learning, you need complete, standardized data. Especially now that the privacy landscape is changing, there’s no better time to buckle down and bolster your journey toward digital maturity.

These are not off-the-cuff suggestions, as the impact of ignoring or misinterpreting these recommendations is plainly visible. With privacy currently being the fastest moving field in our industry, we’re reaching the point where most—if not all—professional discussions have a privacy angle. While that’s great in terms of profile, it’s not really good in terms of quality.  

If you ask me, most cookie banners are subprime usability blockers that annoy users and turn them away. At worst, they’re dark patterns obscuring malice. When the most common denominator is so prevalent—that being lousy banners—we get what is called banner blindness, a phenomenon where web users (un)consciously ignore any banner-like information. When that symptom kicks in, it’s a downhill race to the bottom.

A likely sequence of events then plays out: marketers settle on a nice and easy bottom feeding tactic, the whack-a-mole game of privacy merry-go-round spins through another orbit as either tech, public opinion or regulators (or all of the above) make a new move to counter it. Recently, for example, it was Brave’s turn in the game of ignoring the privacy elephant in the room. The company announced it was going to block cookies by default and roll out a cookie pop-up blocking feature to Android and desktop users, which is arguably a step backwards. Rather than adding any clarity around what data is collected and why, the browser actually acts on behalf of consumers and removes choice from the user. It’s important to highlight that regulation is not anti-business, but it’s pro-consumer. Privacy-enhancing technology needs to respect this narrative. 

My former colleague (and still just as wise) Myles Younger powers his crystal ball with some nostalgia to suggest consent pop-ups are dead. “Someday soon we’ll look back on cookie consent pop-ups the same way we look back on “300 hours of free AOL” CD-ROMs littering our sidewalks. The farcical dying gasp of a dying way of transacting a digital thing,” Myles argues—and he is not wrong. It’s been seen before, as observed by the analytics supremo Simo Ahava, who argues that Do Not Track was a failure from the start. Diving into the implications of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention, better known as ITP 2.1, on web analytics, Ahava says that “Funnily enough, ITP 2.1 removes support for the Do Not Track signal in Safari, denoting the end to this miserable experiment in WebKit. Had more sites respected DNT when determining should visitors be tracked or not, perhaps we wouldn’t have seen ITP 2.1 in its current shape.” 

Consent management is anti-user.

Why are these well-meaning initiatives failing? Google surveyed over 7000 people across Europe in 2021 and found that users want to have control of their data. Recent follow-up research quantified the degree to which the feeling of control influenced customer confidence in brands. The conclusion? A positive privacy experience on a site has a measurable positive impact on a brand.  

So, how can you create such a positive privacy experience and avoid the pitfalls that we’ve seen with Do Not Track (DNT) and the current crop of Consent Management Platforms (CMP)? If it’s up to Google, brands should make the experience:

• Meaningful by showing people what they get in return for sharing their data
• Memorable by reminding people what data they shared and when
• Manageable by providing tools for people to manage their privacy

The demise of third-party cookies means the future of first-party cookies. 

For many, applying this mnemonic to first-party cookies is a work in progress. Cookie consent banners are still relatively new, even though third-party cookies have been under threat for many years. We know which browsers restrict their use and we expect these restrictions to extend to Chromium browsers in 2023.

If digital marketing can’t function without third-party cookies, this has the potential to hit big tech in the coffers, and we cannot allow this to happen. There’s a clear motivation to solve existing use cases by utilizing privacy-enhancing technology—this is where The Privacy Sandbox comes in. According to a Google statement, “Privacy Sandbox for the Web will phase out third-party cookies and limit covert tracking. By creating new web standards, it will provide publishers with safer alternatives to existing technology, so they can continue building digital businesses while your data stays private.”

We’ll see the next phase of testing kick off in 2023 when the Privacy Sandbox API is publicly available for testing on Android. Right now, this is API testing, which means that they’re testing for developers rather than users. The user testing phase is where it gets real for real people. This is the opportunity to succeed, think of Google’s mnemonic, instead of failing like DNT and CMPs.  

Cookie management sitrep.

Right now, you can open the settings in your browser on each device and scroll through the list of cookies for each site, and decide to delete them. You can then visit the site and repeat the exercise in the “manage cookies” section of the CMP.  However, this current process doesn’t fit in terms of being manageable. In fact, the term laborious doesn’t even begin to describe it.

When it comes to qualifying as meaningful, cookie management has a low score because it’s so opaque—how can you tell who else is getting access to the cookies and for what purposes? As for memorability, most users only remember the frustration and tedium, but little else regarding their choices.

So, considering the future of cookie management, how might the Privacy Sandbox address the choices users have to make with regards to “tracking” and their privacy? While this section is entirely speculation and therefore not an official roadmap, it’s aspirational with the aim to be realistic and pragmatic. My thoughts are as follows. 

• Users get to decide what topics they are interested in and willing to share with third parties.  
• Users allow the browser to build a list of topics, but the user reviews and controls the list periodically asking to be reminded on a set schedule.
• Users can choose to set their topics to apply across all sites they visit. Any advertising they see on any site they visit will use and respect these settings.
• Users can choose to review their topics preferences on a per site basis. Users get to curate (and review) their own whitelist/blacklist for sites or types of sites.
• Users ask to be reminded to check their preferences every so many days, weeks or months.
• Users can choose to reset all data in the browser automatically every so many days, weeks or months.

Now, let’s apply similar controls to first-party cookies:

• Users will be able to tell the browser what type of cookies they will accept, and whether they want to be measured—anonymously or otherwise.
• Users can specify this applies to all sites, some sites (whitelist) or types of sites.
• These settings are reviewed on a scheduled basis.

What are the right default values to apply on first use? The good news is, there are no default values. On first use, and on a frequent basis, the user must explicitly set their own first use values. In other words, no values are suggested or automatically preselected.

How is this different from a CMP banner? Set it once, and make a conscious set of decisions with no intrusive user experience on every site or app you use. This could actually be set at a “profile” level across all devices and all browsers. This requires less mark-up and coding to be done by site owners. In short, there’s less to maintain, less to go wrong, less to slow down and less to cause friction.

How is this different from DNT or Brave? A more granular approach and a genuine user-controlled choice are the fundamental differences that make this approach manageable and meaningful. The range of choice is meaningful and the act of making a choice is manageable as it is made as friction-free as possible. Moreover, having to make a choice is memorable, as well as the ability to set reminders to review these choices at your convenience.

Now is the time to apply these lessons for the future.

The challenge for The Privacy Sandbox is to reduce friction, increase transparency and enhance authority. The privacy improvements will cater for existing use cases as well as provide a manageable, meaningful and memorable privacy experience for users.

That said, what’s the takeaway for digital marketers? Google said that “The Privacy Sandbox on Android will be a multi-year effort,” so what to do right now? Circling back to the start of this article, it’s important to:

• Take control of your data
• Embrace the regulatory spirit
• Go beyond the bare minimum
• Make it meaningful, memorable and manageable

Though we accept the looming end of the third-party cookie, this doesn’t mean we have to stop digital marketing. New privacy-enhancing tech changes the methodology, as the same use cases are catered for with new tech to enable better ad serving. Having learned from the success of these technologies applied to the end of third-party cookies, we can confidently focus the lessons on our first-party data collection. What works across sites and apps must also have the same utility on individual sites and apps. Keeping that in mind, the end goals remain:

• Build a relationship with your customers
• Be transparent
• Be useful
• Be responsible with data

All in all, achieving these goals and aiming to provide a better experience has immense value for your customers and your business.

When it comes to the privacy arena, what trends are you seeing agnostically?

Privacy is one of the fastest changing and most complex realms in the digital space, even more so than Web3. On top of that, privacy is an ever-present undercurrent—ongoing in everything that we do. With a plethora of global and regional players involved—the tech sector, regulatory bodies, public opinion—we can safely say there’s a complex interaction at play, which makes coming up with any long-term prediction or silver bullet solution practically impossible. As a consequence, our waterways can quickly go from clear to muddy. What follows is a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt among many companies. 

In working with companies across the board, we still see a lot of confusion around technical terminology, with partners raising questions such as, “What is personal data compared to Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?” To be frank, we believe this is in part driven by clickbait. Headlines propagating that “GA is illegal” cause unnecessary confusion and concern, when the fact of the matter is that Google’s GA4 as a product has gone through a massive rebuild from the ground up to address and tackle the issues in question. As a baseline trend, we’re receiving more and more questions about privacy matters with regards to all products in the digital marketing ecosystem—and we welcome them with open arms, because we’re here to help solve the riddle. 

How are you helping clients navigate this new, data-focused advertising landscape?

Our objective is to help our partners take proper control of and ownership over their data collection and activation. Therefore, we first focus on basic data hygiene, conducting health checks and audits. It’s very important to know what your company has in store, so we ask questions like what data is collected, which cookies are set, how is the collected data used, and who else is getting the data of your users? Creating a graph of 3P consumers and beyond is complex and thus requires high levels of scrutiny. 

Though the third-party cookie deprecation has been pushed back until at least late 2025, we don’t like to wait around and carry on in the same way we have always done. Rather, we’re embracing a first-class, first-party and privacy-first strategy, for instance by helping companies migrate to GA4—because we see no reasons for taking a reactive approach. We make sure our partners get on the front foot as fast and efficiently as possible, with a strong emphasis on automation. When you’re working with large data volumes, you can’t rely on human-centric processes to manage compliance. For instance, we have implemented automated machine learning as part of the data pipelines in order to prevent PII ingestion. There’s no way that a company can afford to manage a breach retrospectively or be proactive without automation—simply put, this is the most efficient way to scale. 

What are the main lessons that you have learned on this journey?

First of all, we clearly communicate to every brand we partner with to always aim for transparency, make a plan, and move beyond the minimum. Let’s be honest, the economic headwinds that we are all currently facing mean that every dollar, euro and pound spent needs to deliver a return more than ever before. As such, preserving data quality is our top priority. To give you the full scoop: everything we do to be more transparent, protect users’ privacy, and apply rigor and governance to data collection and activation is, in fact, enhancing the data quality, too. So long as you go about your data the right way, you can’t go wrong. 

Speaking of data quality, another key lesson that we have learned is to use time to the fullest. Yes, industry leaders like Google may unexpectedly push back plans, but rather than seeing this as an issue, we believe it can work to our advantage. Setting up the privacy tech for this tool is quick and easy—the hard part is changing the people and processes, which we know can take a while to get completely right. Though we expect that many brands will interpret this extension of GA360 as extra time to look around and perhaps jump ship to another technology, we believe that this is a risky strategy. Instead, we recommend our partners to take this change of plans as an opportunity to perfect, rather than a chance to pivot. There are no excuses to delay GA4 migration. It's imperative to use this time to manage change, translate data workloads, dashboards and data pipelines, and ensure all those GA360 assets become high quality GA4 assets.

Do you see gaps in performance between brands that invest in privacy and those who don’t?

There's a clear and definite advantage to taking a strong privacy-first approach to data—and companies are catching on. People are realizing (or, at least, starting to realize) that we’re not playing a zero-sum game and the exchange of data in return for personalization and better ad targeting is the data privacy transaction we all engage in—with reciprocity being the key word. Those who are best able to complete this transaction at scale will be rewarded with the best results, whereas those who continue to walk the third-party cookie path will fall behind. For some time now, we’ve been helping many of our partners run on a healthy diet of deterministic and probabilistic data and not trip over the mix of consented first-party and modeled data, and we can tell you: they are in good shape. 

Want to discuss next steps? Get in touch. 

Everything you do for privacy feeds back into your data quality, hence the opportunity to sharpen and perfect your process of migration to GA4 is one to take with both hands. It’s essential for brands to look beyond the obstacles of GA4 and work to get the best first-party data off the back of the migration.

We’re here to help make sense of changes in the privacy landscape, how to make use of GA4 data, and how such technologies can support all your marketing needs. If you have any questions with regards to GA4 migration, please reach out to growth@mediamonks.com. We’ll schedule some time to discuss any questions you may have and see how we can support your analytics needs.

Insights for this piece were contributed by Doug Hall, VP Data Services and Technology, EMEA; Julien Coquet, Director of Analytics, EMEA; Suzanne Jansen, Head of Data Strategy, EMEA; Véronique Franzen, Senior Director Business Consulting, EMEA; Jakub Otrząsek, VP Data, APAC; Sayf Sharif, VP Data, NAMER; Michael Neveu, Director of Data, NAMER; and Wenting Wang, Senior Director of Data & Analytics, UK.

For brands, a benefit of the move to digital was that wide swaths of consumers were now sharing their purchase intent—valuable data used to surface up precise results. Consumers expect relevance in the products and content that’s recommended to them, and this expectation will only grow; imagine having to search for what you’re looking for in the 8th page of Google Search results!

On the flip side, companies face increased ethical scrutiny in how they use customer data. Business strategies designed to covertly collect personal data and monetize it are myopic; they may have implications on the customer relationships in the long-term. It’s important that companies instead look at responsible, privacy-focused strategies to earn consumer trust, even more so as we move to a post-cookie future.

Privacy is the fulcrum to the future of marketing.

With many consumers increasingly becoming aware and wary of the use of their data, and with regulatory bodies coming forward with laws and legislations, now is the time for brands to give their audiences a seat at the negotiation table when it comes to their privacy. At the recent Google Marketing Live event for the Leadership Circle in Hyderabad, India, privacy was the key theme, including how it is the fulcrum to building the future of marketing. Some key interesting stats that were shared:

• 48% of people globally have stopped buying or using a service from a company due to privacy concerns.
• Four out of the top five countries that searched for online privacy (in English) were from APAC.
• Three out of five companies globally report benefits of deeper loyalty and improved agility and efficiency with being privacy mature. 

Essentially, modern brands use data to serve customers and provide a meaningful value exchange—more relevant, personalized experiences that enhance the brand-consumer relationship—rather than treat audiences as another product to auction off and sell. So while examples of data privacy misconduct often make the news, it’s instructive to acknowledge and learn from those who are handling data with utmost care. Walmart embraces privacy in the design of its organizational processes and structures, products and services by constantly monitoring the technological landscape for potential threats, for example. This way they are self-reliant on the collection and protection of data and hence subject to lesser data vulnerability. Likewise, brands can focus on privacy not as an inhibitor, but rather the key to unlocking better customer experiences through more ethical and sustainable use of data.

Focus on consent and value.

Given the fact that data security and management require a significant investment of resources by digitally mature companies, it’s important to use those tools to serve customers better, because that’s where the return on investment lies.

Two ways that brands create value is by offering transparency about data collection and control in how it is used. Ultimately it is about delivering value to end users. Consented first-party data and insights from privacy-safe technologies like Topics API provide incremental value to marketers while keeping online content and services free. Data-driven marketing focused on transparency and control can transform marketing strategies, enhance customer relationships, and yield useful content to people or even inform the product design.

A greater focus on first-party data is important because over reliance on third-party cookies, a tactic brands have taken for granted, is increasingly unwelcome by consumers and increasingly unsustainable given future plans to phase them out. Expanding beyond third-party cookies is key to building a long-term marketing strategy of the future.

Our work for Ace Hardware illustrates this philosophy. Through revamping its rewards program, Ace Hardware was able to improve the customer experience and deliver on its reputation of being “The Helpful Place” for those wanting to improve their homes. The app rewards customers for their loyalty while enriching Ace’s trove of first-party data. By unlocking insights into customer interest and intent—without the use of third-party cookies or targeted ads—the brand was able to deliver a meaningful value exchange in return for data.

Zero in on the data you need.

Another benefit of shielding consumer privacy is preventing data bloat by collecting only the data necessary to drive value for your marketing—not gobbling all your customers’ data. This enhances data hygiene, yields cleaner analytics and helps minimize risks posed by data breaches.

Software giant SAP estimates that nearly 73% of data collected by companies is never used. When data minimization efforts are put into practice, there are limited opportunities for collecting information, thereby condensing the depth of detail and timeframe in which data is possessed. This forms the nucleus of GDPR regulations, helps weed out the excess data and focus on obtaining only relevant information with focused questions and being intentional in data collection efforts.

Activate insights through continual testing.

When companies build a customer-learning and serving culture, they determine the purpose of data before asking for consent and a clear explanation is provided to customers on what they stand to gain in parting with their data.

With a focus on learning about and serving customers, brands are able to build a “test and learn” culture to inspire increasingly valuable experiences reinforced by data. Amex has been able to do this successfully with initiatives such as the small business lending program, which they piloted after having a deeper understanding of their customer data signals. Incidentally the brand also ranks high in customer privacy in the Fortune 500 companies list. Likewise, brands who are agile in responding to imminent privacy changes are breaking down the privacy era.

The right approach to data privacy can create a ripple effect of positive outcomes: deterring churn to competitors, strengthening perception, overcoming privacy obstacles and ultimately earning consumer trust. With these benefits in mind, keeping privacy the focus of your data strategy can do more than keep a brand agile amidst new regulations—it’s also a key component to future-proof growth.

We might speculate as to other reasons why the deadline has changed, but we can be confident that—whether from a privacy or commercial perspective—the proposed solutions haven’t met expectations. This is actually encouraging because we should expect a 2024 solution that doesn’t compromise on privacy or commercial performance.

But what does this mean for digital marketing? What changes? How do we position ourselves with this delay? There are things we know and things we don’t, but we can prepare for both. And one thing is for certain, the worst possible tactic is doing nothing. 

Here’s what we do know:

• Marketing on Google owned and operated properties (Search, YouTube and Maps) remains unchanged given its use of first party, rather than third party cookies.
• Audience (re)targeting, measurement and attribution will change, but we don’t know when or how.
• Life goes on within walled gardens, but with an increased focus on the value of first-party data across industry leaders like Google, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn and TikTok.
• Elsewhere in the industry, there’s an expectation that the adoption of so-called “solutions”—clean rooms, ID resolution, SaaS marketing clouds, contextual—will slow down.

We agree that increased first-party data focus is the best move for marketers and agencies. This is a gift that cements the foundation of fully consented first-party data as part of the overall data strategy. 

The postponement is not an excuse to just keep doing digital marketing as we’ve always done it.  That’s a “fat and happy” symptom and a one-way ticket to extinction. Indeed, any lost opportunity to explore and learn new avenues is a waste.  That’s not to say we need to spend this extra time trying to maintain the status quo. Embracing regulatory and tech change as a driver rather than a business impediment is a competitive advantage.  

Here’s a recap of the Death of the 3P cookie timeline:

• 2018: DoubleClick ID files redacted
• 2019: Privacy Sandbox is announced
• 2020: Third-party cookie deprecation announced (targeting 2022) 
• January 2021: Google commits to Privacy Sandbox and Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)
• March 2021: Google announces that it will not allow “alternate identifiers”
• June 2021: Google announces Chrome will stop supporting 3P cookies by end of 2023
• July 2022: Google Chrome has delayed 3P Cookie deprecation to 2024

How many more delays do we face? It doesn’t matter.  We’re already in a precarious situation that common sense says we don’t leave untouched.

One of the most recognizable personalities in the digital analytics industry, Avinash Kaushik, said, “Most browsers have allowed you to block third-party cookies since the dawn of the internet. A cluster of people (like me) have taken advantage of that option.” (Chrome is the last of the most popular browsers to have no restrictions on third-party data storage like cookies). “So your current third-party cookie tracking based audience and measurement at the minimum already has a signal quality degradation built in,” Kaushik goes on to say.

These are the unignorable signals of change. More than ever, be prepared.

What’s topical about Chrome’s Topics?

The Chrome browser currently has a strong market foothold with above 50% in market share, despite not really having a solution following Safari’s (Apple’s) crusade to kill third party cookies. While it hasn’t gone for marking the cookiecalypse yet, like Safari and other browsers have, Chrome has attempted to address the needs of marketers with ideas to alter some marketing capabilities to work in a privacy-safe way. 

Google has sought solutions which would enable some form of safe profiling and data exchange between martech players as ad revenues continue to be mission-critical for the health of many businesses. These solutions are going to be built into the Chrome browser, packaged as the Privacy Sandbox.  

The most recent announcement introduces Topics, which are an updated version of FLoC (federated learning of cohorts). The initial idea behind FLoC was to create a mechanism which would classify users based on their behavior into cohorts which guarantee privacy (through entropy). By design, cohorts would be more generic and would remove 1:1 targeting, but at the same time would restore interest-based targeting. The main issue of the initial solution was in mathematics, as algorithms were translating domain names into numbers without a clear understanding of “topicality” of the site. 

As FLoC did not win hearts of the industry, Google went to the drawing board and came back with Topics. The idea of cohorts still persists, though the mechanism of translating domain names into “topics” for further targeting was updated along with some privacy assumptions. Even though the proposal is not yet fully developed, there is a consistent approach of using domain names in order to classify users into cohorts. Google envisions some form of a dictionary and set of rules that determine which domain name translates to which topic. Current documentation points out that usage of sub domains is encouraged to support mapping into topics. 

How does the third-party cookie crumble crush my current domain name strategy? 

The main issue with third-party cookies is that they enable “foreign” actors to collect information about individuals as they travel between different sites. Though as everything in a binary word of computers, the definition of a foreigner is very black and white. All cookies set by a different domain are considered third parties. Computers do not care much about the structure of your organization, brands, subsidiaries and ownership. 

Multibrand businesses which operate across multiple domains face challenges in building user profiles without third-party cookies. As data management platforms (DMPs) and many marketing solutions struggle to exist without third-party cookies, it is becoming more difficult to create a single customer view across brands one may own. As first-party data strategies are picking up steam, there are some critical decisions to be made. To operate in a first-party cookie context and be able to exchange data between their own brands, brands need to operate under the same domain name. 

The most apparent manifestation of this situation are media outlets which own multiple mastheads. As publishers try to build value propositions around their audiences, every piece of information counts. Without a DMP or third-party cookie, it would be impossible to achieve scale across different sites they own today. 

So, how can I make a name for myself?

As it is possible to register your own top-level domains or TLDs (though they are expensive and it takes time), and we observe ongoing pressure on first-party data collection (meaning you need one universal domain across your whole business), it's time to consider your new universal domain name! 

Let's assume you run a business called “Example” together with two brands, “Big” and “Small.” It’s likely you have example.com, big.com and small.com as domain names. With the lack of third-party cookies, it is hard to exchange information about prospects between the sites. With help of a customer data platform (CDP) or a good data team, you may join first-party data between the sites to research the level of cannibalisation or overlap. 

To simplify your life (and data), you may want to consider big.example.com and small.example.com as primary addresses. This will enable all sorts of integration and will load your first-party data strategy with rocket fuel. If you are big enough, you can go for your own top-level domain to create something like big.from.example and small.from.example. Coming back to Topics, if your brands operate with multiple categories, more subdomains enables better profiling, like automotive.big.from.example or sport.big.example.com. 

How do I get started now?

Well, FLoC did not survive long enough to become a thing and Topics are still quite nascent themselves. Though everyone is pretty committed to getting rid of third-party cookies, and some businesses already operate in a world where over 80% of traffic comes from browsers that no longer support them by default. Google has postponed the moment of putting the final nail into the cookie’s coffin, so the timelines seem rather floaty. 

Today we operate with the assumption that hour 0 will come around next year or the year following. All things considered, there is not much time to prepare for such big decisions. Now, it’s time to plan.