Ah, the “cookiepocalypse.” A lot of digital ink has been spilled about the end of third party cookies. You almost expect to see folks spinning signs on street corners warning of the coming digital end of days.
Not to make light of the topic, though. When Google shuts down support for third party cookies in 2025, there will big implications – especially for CPG brands. Taking action now could spell the difference between thriving, surviving or getting shipwrecked on the waves rolling in.Let’s break out a crystal ball and see what each one of these scenarios might look like in five years.
Not to be a downer, but let’s start with the bad news.
Companies were warned that their digital advertising could be nearly completely shut off without the ability to target, track, and re-market to consumers using third-party cookies. Some ignored the clarion call and refused to change.Convinced they could rely on traditional means to digitally target consumers with essentially same precision they used to buy traditional media, they didn’t exactly go dark.
But their click-through rates – and eventually their return on marketing investment – had never been worse.
Even before the pandemic, the CPG industry faced challenges: margin pressure, eroding consumer trust, and an army of small, insurgent agile competitors chipping away at the giants’ market share.
The downward spiral included revenue shrinkage, share price declines, and the constant looming threat of acquisition.
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Thankfully, that wasn’t the case for all CPG brands. Many of them made it through – but just barely.
These are the survivors after the end of third party cookies: CPGs that made the jump and deployed a unified consumer database as the first step in creating a direct relationship with their end users.
These brands started off well with a marketing-led initiative to get all their consumer information into one place, much of it coming from first-party data gathered from their e-commerce sites, registration pages, online promotions, and live events. From there, they focused on a single use case: shoring up the digital marketing precision and accuracy losses that came from third-party cookies.
The survivors kept click through rates healthy, and made good use of their marketing budgets. But no other department except IT had access to the data, and nothing changed outside marketing. The pressures on these companies continue, particularly in operational efficiency and competitive response to smaller, faster-moving rivals. With the upcoming end of third-party cookies, IT teams have a unique opportunity to amplify their impact on revenue growth and customer experience. Read more to find out why…
Some CPG brands made changes that put them ahead, making them the visionary heroes of the cookiepocalypse. They were able to not just get through the end of third-party cookies, but took advantage of the turmoil in the industry to build lasting competitive advantages. They focused on driving all new and existing consumer information into a unified database.
For larger companies, this meant tens of millions of consumers. Their masterstroke was putting the data in a robust but accessible customer data platform that could be used across functions in the organization. It created a depth and breadth of consumer insight, forming a natural barrier to entry that smaller competitors couldn’t afford to match.The CDP answered their immediate need for precision in digital marketing campaigns. And it drove down costs by allowing the CPG brands to use their own insights to collaborate with media agencies. But most importantly, other departments outside marketing could also leverage this direct access to ten of millions of consumers:
A properly managed and nurtured unified consumer database can even enable CPG brands to expand out of the consumer goods business altogether. Some of these companies were able to follow the example of Red Bull and build media and entertainment arms, all run using the same consumer intelligence, exploring once unthought-of mergers and partnerships in the media world.
But that’s another blog for another day.
Returning to the present, the end of third-party cookies is still at least a couple years out. We can’t really foresee the future, but we can offer studied estimates.
And the smart money should be on the brands that embrace a centralized consumer database that allows insights to be shared across departments for a whole company response to the cookie deprecation – and any other crisis that comes their way.
