“Much less ready”: Marketers’ post-cookie readiness has dropped 23% since 2022

“People don’t feel any more ready. They feel considerably less ready than they did two years ago, which is a little strange (given) that people supposedly had two years to prepare,” said Ryan Fleisch, senior director of product marketing at Adobe.

According to the study released today, the proportion of marketers who said their brands were “somewhat or very ready” for deprecating third-party cookies increased from 78% in 2022, when this same survey was conducted for the first time, to 60% in 2024. However, in this time, the proportion of marketers whose marketing strategies still rely on third-party cookies has decreased significantly, from 75% to 49%, indicating to Fleisch that cookie-free testing might not be up to the task.

But “it’s not for lack of effort” that readiness levels are declining, Fleisch argued. “When you put those two statistics together, it means to me that the technology an industry is providing to these brands is not enough to meet their needs.”

An agency manager who spoke on condition of anonymity said the proportion of clients still relying on third-party cookies is far lower than the 49% listed in the survey, with less than 25% of overall media spend from their agency being focused on (third-party cookie).

Meanwhile, nothing in Adobe’s report surprised Mike Pollack, general manager of digital media solutions at Epsilon, that much, he said. However, contrary to Adobe’s findings, Epsilon found that a majority of marketers are still dependent on the third-party cookie and a minority feel ready to abandon it. In a recent survey of 257 U.S. marketers conducted by Epsilon during the first quarter of 2024, 75% of respondents said they were still “very or moderately dependent” on third-party cookies, up from 82% in 2020. And Only 44% of respondents said they felt “very prepared” for cookie deprecation in 2024.

Alternatives without cookies “lack maturity”

Adobe’s study found that only 28% of respondents spend at least half of their marketing budget on cookie-based activations (compared to 45% two years ago), but the majority of spending is allocated to environments that help replicate the simple audience targeting experience. , like the walled gardens of social platforms.

• 62% of respondents said they plan to shift their spending primarily toward walled garden ecosystems like social media platforms.
• 49% said they prioritize enabling first-party data.
• 42% said they work directly with publishers

Fleisch pointed out that 78% of respondents said they purchased a cleanroom or customer data platform (CDP), but only 34% said it actually made them feel better prepared for cookieless marketing. And in the first-party data category, he said that among respondents who reported using a CDP, only 23% associated their first-party data with second-party data, while 28% said they associated it with third party data. .

“The message (to marketers) can’t stop at, ‘Go build a first-party data strategy and be done with it.’ “But I think brands may have fallen victim to that messaging,” Fleisch said. He added: “CDPs have let brands down if they don’t do more than enable first-party data. And we risk recreating the problem we seek to solve. And this is now inherently forcing people back to the old ways of buying directly through the platforms.

First-party data solutions are the predominant funnel for which agency executives and Epsilon clients reallocate media budgets.

“Among our customer base, probably the most consistent response has been to build a first-party data strategy,” Pollack said, whether through CDPs or cleanrooms. For reference, the Epsilon survey found that 60% of respondents were focused on expanding their first-party data strategies and 59% were focused on building a CDP.

Following this, Pollack said clients are moving more money to walled gardens, which he said is attractive to clients because of the ability to maintain personalized targeting, but ultimately comes with challenges when it comes to performance transparency and overspending with the platform.

“We’re seeing a progression in first-party data and we’re seeing customers and businesses are much more comfortable with the fact that this needs to be a reliable signal that is used,” the agency director said. To date, nearly three-quarters of their customers have uploaded proprietary data into a DSP.