Limited seats remain

Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25

REGISTER

WTF is piggybacking?

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

Piggyback rides can be fun for children. For website operators, not so much. 

Piggybacking — also known as cookie-syncing — is how an ad tech firm can drop a third-party cookie on a website’s visitors without being granted access by the website via another ad tech firm that the website has granted access, as covered in the explainer skit above. 

An issue with this third-party tracking daisy-chain is that it makes it difficult for website operators to rein in outside companies’ abilities to collect information about their audiences, which risks putting the operators in privacy regulators’ crosshairs.

More in Marketing

‘The conversation has shifted’: The CFO moved upstream. Now agencies have to as well

One interesting side effect of marketing coming under greater scrutiny in the boardroom: CFOs are working more closely with agencies than ever before.

Why one brand reimbursed $10,000 to customers who paid its ‘Trump Tariff Surcharge’ last year

Sexual wellness company Dame is one of the first brands to proactively return money tied to President Donald Trump’s now-invalidated tariffs.

WTF is Meta’s Manus tool?

Meta added a new agentic AI tool to its Ads Manager in February. Buyers have been cautiously probing its potential use cases.