Spurred by retail media and CTV spend, CPG brands are quietly leaving the cookie behind

The industry’s transition away from the cookie slowed, but hasn’t stalled following Google’s retreat from deprecation. Forrester’s Q2 2025 Pulse survey found that 35% were reconsidering spending on cookie alternatives in response to Google’s cookie deprecation walkback — but  53% expected to maintain existing ad spend, while continuing cookieless experiments or investments this year.

Another Forrester study of 1,000 B2C marketers found that 68% had invested in zero- or first-party data collection, while 69% were testing more context-based advertising methods. 

Despite the lack of urgency over deprecation, advertisers are much less reliant on it than they were. CPG clients, however, are among the brands last to move on from the tech. Barring DTC firms, their business models mean they lack opportunities to collect first-party information on their customers, so by their nature, CPG advertisers are reliant on other parties for fine-tuned audience information. 

“They don’t have a backbone of other data. And for an industry sector like this, which is so heavily advertised, having credible data sources is super important,” said Pete Wallace, managing director EMEA at contextual targeting provider GumGum.

But investments in retail media data, as well as alternative IDs and cookieless techniques like contextual targeting, are moving them on from the third-party cookie. And the opportunities presented by CTV – the scale of linear television with the addressability of digital media – provide the pull factor.

With these advertisers looking towards other means of finding their target consumer, the third-party cookie is becoming all but obsolete, the last resort of brands taking a scattergun, imprecise approach to their programmatic activity. 

Data vendor and alternative ID provider ID5, for example, has seen an influx of CPG brands looking to improve their data solutions. “It’s definitely ramped up over the last 18 months,” said CEO Mathieu Roche. The number of projects taken on for CPG clients has tripled in two years, he added.

Though he didn’t share precise figures, Wallace said GumGum had also seen a rise in investment from CPGs. “We’ve seen an uptick in interest in contextual solutions. We’ve seen more CPG brands jumping on our pre-bid activation,” he said.

Rachel Gantz, managing director of Proximic by Comscore, said that CPG advertisers had increased their use of its “Predictive Audiences” custom targeting solution, which does not use cookies, by 66% in the first half of the year. “That growth underscores the urgency with which brands are embracing cookieless solutions that don’t transact on user identifiers, ensuring they can scale their campaigns effectively while future-proofing their strategies,” she said.

One reason is brands’ increasing investment in CTV and online video spend, which has drawn budgets away from linear television. Nearly two-thirds (66%) of marketers in North America expect to increase their CTV spending this year, per Nielsen’s 2025 Annual Marketing Report.

CTV is an “increasingly large component of how [brands] reach their audiences,” said Kate Puccinelli, chief customer officer at Nexxen. That’s meant fewer dollars flowing into cookie-dependent parts of the advertising ecosystem. 

“CPGs want to be where the consumer is, and the more consumers are spending time in CTV environments, the more that they’re going to gravitate to that,” said Tim Rogers, Pubmatic vp of commerce media.

At mobile SSP VideoHeroes, CPG client investment rose 33% between the first and second quarters of 2025. “We’ve seen a 28% increase in H1 2025 compared to H1 2024, and we expect this trend to continue,” said Edward Castillo, its head of demand and partnerships. 

The other, arguably bigger, reason is CPG investment in retail media. Three-fourths (74%) of marketers consider RMNs more important to their media strategy in 2025, according to Nielsen’s study. 

“Most CPG brands continue to be under high margin pressure and the effort it takes to collect and target first-party data – or even third-party – in order to generate sales is outclassed by the fact that Amazon and Walmart, to name a couple, have made it really easy,” said Rick Stalling, chief data officer at Croud.

A Pubmatic survey conducted in December found that on average, retailers’ revenue from their media networks made up 7% of their overall revenues, up from 1.5% in 2021. “Retail media is enabling [CPG] brands to utilize purchase intent and that purchase history … really valuable signals that brands will want to use as a means to target the right consumer,” said Rogers.

For years, cookies lay at the end of the path of least resistance for marketers. Now, said Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai, “the easiest thing to do is to rent signals from merchants and to find proxies of intent in Walmart’s dataset and Target’s dataset.”

Though media agencies generally prefer not to acknowledge it, budget constraints and a belief that closer targeting can deliver more certain outcomes on media spend are also behind the shift, just as they’re behind the ever-increasing paid social spending (per WARC, global paid social investment is expected to reach $286.2 billion this year, up 12.3% compared with 2024.)

“When you think about how the cost of goods are impacting margins, and now you have investments in AI impacting margins … there’s a single pool of dollars … and the advertising pool is shrinking,” said one holding company media buyer, who exchanged anonymity for candor. 

They added: “My hypothesis on that is it’s much less about third-party cookie deprecation, and much more trying to spend their advertising dollars wisely.”