Brand, agency execs speak out on Google’s latest cookie-killing plan and cookieless identifier challenges

The third-party cookie’s prolonged demise is kinda agonizing. But with Google announcing recently that it will deprecate the ad industry’s de facto identifier for 1% of Chrome users in the first quarter of 2024, perhaps the end of the road is near.
During the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, which kicked off on May 22 in Palm Springs, California, brand and agency executives weighed in on the present and future of the third-party cookie and cookieless identifiers, as featured in the video below.
To what extent are advertisers actually weaning themselves off of the third-party cookie? Are alternative identifiers currently equipped to compensate for the cookie’s loss? And, of course — after two previous postponements — will Google really go through with killing off the third-party cookie after all?
“It’s kind of like crying wolf, so to speak. Is this it? Is this real? I think we’re getting much closer to reality when they make that kind of announcement,” HP’s senior director of global marketplace strategy and media execution Morgan Chemij said of Google’s latest announcement.
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