7 seats left:

Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit

SECURE YOUR SEAT

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

Walmart, Target, Kroger swap name brands for private labels in Thanksgiving meal deals

Walmart’s website says its meal costs 25% less than the basket it offered last year, and that the turkey was at the lowest price since 2019.

Amid search wars, Google touts YouTube, display inventory to advertisers

Google is pushing Demand Gen and YouTube to ad partners, hedging against the inevitable erosion of its search business by AI chatbots.

Future of Marketing Briefing: The agentic turn inside programmatic advertising

The arrival of the Agentic RTB Framework this week lands as this week lands as the third agentic standard in under a month.