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

Why consulting firms won’t win at advertising until they solve these points.

The CMO-CCO split is becoming a corporate fiction

The longstanding divide between marketing and communications is eroding — not with a bang but with a slow, steady merging of responsibilities. 

‘Clicks don’t pay the bills, pipeline quality does,’ becomes LinkedIn’s case for its pricey ad prices

LinkedIn’s head of ads measurement, Jae Oh, explains why he believes the platform is “phenomenally cheaper” than others in the market.

Ad Tech Briefing: Digital Omnibus is about to land — here’s what it means for GDPR, and the future of ad targeting

The EC’s Digital Omnibus could redefine data rules — and shift power in digital advertising.