Another week, another bombshell announcement in the world of advertising identity. This time, it’s Google pushing back their ultimatum for the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome. Good news for most of us probably, but also a two-sided announcement. 

On the one hand, this news will come as a relief to publishers and platforms who have been struggling to meet the previous deadline of “early 2022”. Given the collective migration we’re contemplating and the fact that nobody in the industry can “be cookieless” on its own, the initial 24 months window was clearly unrealistic. It is therefore good news to have more time to prepare for this massive change. 

On the other hand, this necessary migration will take a back seat on the priority list, meaning that we are likely to be in the same situation of urgency in two years. All the while not solving for the current privacy compliance issues related to third-party cookies, or for their unavailability for 30+% of the population (and associated monetisation issues for publishers of their Safari, Firefox and Edge traffic). 

At ID5, we welcome the delay to better support our clients and partners in their migration to a privacy-first shared ID infrastructure. However, we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of the long-term goal: rebuilding the core identity infrastructure supporting digital advertising in a manner that works for advertisers, for publishers and most importantly, for consumers – and not just for Google and Apple. This has been, and will continue to be, our North Star, despite Google and Apple dancing around privacy as they fight with each other for global dominance. 

We know the destination, now let’s all try to enjoy the ride!