The demise of the cookie is postponed again.

The initiative to remove third-party cookies on Chrome has not gone smoothly. Google first announced its plan to replace third-party cookies with FLoC in January 2020. FLoC was another name for third-party cookies, and consumers and advertisers quickly caught on that this wasn’t anything new. The replacement for cookies was heavily criticized for its potential to generate or infer sensitive attributions through users’ online behavior and interests. 

Fast forward to January 2022, and Google returned to the drawing board. The company announced the scrapping of FLoC, and within the same week, introduced (drumroll, please)... Topics. Topics is one element of Google’s wider Privacy SandBox plan to crumble third-party cookies in Chrome to improve user privacy. 

The new initiative received a lukewarm welcome from the ad tech industry, privacy experts, and consumers. “Google is simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic with their ‘Topics’ solution,” said Chris Porter, co-CTO at El Toro IP Targeting, “The solution calls for grouping your weekly browsing behaviors into three of 350 available categories for advertisers to deliver relevant ads. Hey, according to my recent browsing behaviors shopping for my wife and child I’m likely deemed a single mother - maybe I’ll qualify for one of those Titanic lifeboats to get as far away from this sinking ship as possible.”

Is the third time the charm?

The can has been kicked down the road a third time (or fourth? We lost count). Google recently announced that it would press pause on its plan to get rid of third-party cookies until at least mid-2024. The search giant expressed it needs more time for testing to ensure users’ online privacy is protected.  

The indecisiveness on privacy from a multinational technology company is thought-provoking. Google's competitors–Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Brave–have restricted cookies for several years now. What’s stopping the tech giant from doing the same? Google accounts for 28.6% of the total 2021 digital advertising revenue in the U.S, and being the largest digital ad publisher in the country could be the reason.

The ride is over.

There’s no need to stress. Let the search giant scramble to find a digital cookie-free solution. El Toro has been living in the cookieless world since 2013. As the leader in IP Targeting, we use more effective, cookieless targeting to reach your audience. Our analytics are based on real human behavior in real-time, not topics of interest gathered from a user’s week-old browsing history. We match mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) to a physical address through the device’s IP address. This provides extreme precision and allows us to bypass cookie-based fraud to serve ads directly to the devices in a household within 24 hours. Can Google do that? (mic drop).

To ensure the right people see your ads at the right time without the use of cookies, reach out to our team today.