Our March event featured Bill Balderaz from Futurety getting us up-to-date on the impending demise of third party cookies. As most of us have heard, third party cookies in Chrome are scheduled to be turned off later this year. What we’re less sure about, is what the heck is coming in to replace these cookies?

Love them or hate them, third party cookies have been a fundamental building block of the $600B+ digital ads ecosystem for years — and this turndown will be one of the biggest changes in the history of of the industry. While browsers such as Safari and Firefox have blocked third party cookies for years, it’s Chrome’s impending Q3 2024 turndown of these cookies that has caught the industry’s attention due to Chrome’s dominant marketshare (64%).

So what comes next? Surely we’re not going back to completely un-targeted “punch the monkey” style ads… One answer is first party data, where instead of relying on a third party cookies tracking our cross-site activity, we rely upon our own customer data. What does that mean in practical terms?

Bill gave us an example of how first party data can be used to build audiences with Futurety’s own product HUCKLE.

Per usual, the CBUSDAW audience had plenty of good questions. As we move towards this (third-party) cookieless future, we’re all  still collectively figuring out what exactly this means and how to balance user privacy with effective marketing solutions.

And, action shots from the event. The main author of this recap neglected to note that he had some fun with the event by doing a LinkedIn poll as a competition between local (real) cookie purveyors. Lion Cub’s won the poll and, as a result, were provided at the event, along with a “cookie consent” form. The event photographer had both a picture of that consent form and edit access to this recap, so he snuck this paragraph in when he added the photo gallery below!

Please join us next month when we have a panel of AI aficionados on tap for an audience-driven talk on the future of data science and AI.