Beyond Cookies: Personalization Without Cookies

Last Updated on: 12th December 2023, 06:15 pm

Marketers have long relied on the use of 3rd-party cookies to create personalized ads and rightly so. They’ve been a fundamental route to success for many years now, however, the end is near!

With Google’s announcement that its Chrome browser will no longer accept cookies in the future, those in the industry are now asking themselves the same worrying question – can you create a personalized ad without the use of cookies?

Our experts Laurie da Silva and Richard Johnson are back again for another episode with some savvy information on how exactly we can plan to handle personalization without cookies.
Watch the 2nd episode now to get an insight into how methods of data monitoring will change and which talks about a new way forward for an individual experience.

It’s sure to be a game changer!

[Full transcription below]

Laurie da Silva:	Once Google announced its Chrome browser would no longer accept 3rd-party cookies, marketers asked themselves a worrying question.
Richard Johnson:	Can you create a personalized ad without the use of cookies?
Laurie da Silva:	Can you create a personalized ad without the use of cookies? The short answer is, yes. By studying a person’s behavior.
Richard Johnson: [00:00:30]	Consider, personalization and product recommendations, and ads are based purely on the behavior of the individual on the advertiser’s website. Currently ads are personalized for an individual, and recommendations are then attached to a third party cookie, which might be used as a tracking mechanism. In the future, ads will still be personalized, but the methods of monitoring their data will be different. Ensuring users will no longer be tracked on the web.
Laurie da Silva: [00:01:00]	When an individual belongs to an interest group, recommendations for a particular advertiser’s products will be stored on that user’s device, with protection against using them for building cross-site user profiles.
Richard Johnson:	Or in the case of subsidiary methods, the user will be tracked across the internet using a different yet cookie-like identifier. Then product recommendations could be used to build detailed user profiles, identifying individuals by the data which they consent to give. This method however will be adversely impacted with limited scale capabilities, and higher privacy and security risks.
[00:01:30] Laurie da Silva:	Since the interest group approach appears to be the more promising of the two options, let’s focus more on that. This group approach introduces two key challenges to personalization. How can you keep the individual experience intact when ads will be served to a group of users, and not to individuals? And what will be the effect of the improved privacy mechanisms on the accuracy of the product recommendations.
Richard Johnson: [00:02:00]	This brings us to The Privacy Sandbox, which is Google’s initiative to create the standards for websites, to access user information without compromising their individual privacy.
Laurie da Silva:	An important component of The Privacy Sandbox known as Product-level TURTLEDOVE, allows advertisers to offer precise product recommendations by keeping their product lists on the user’s device. It will also give users the same experience as they find today, while maintaining higher privacy guarantees.
Richard Johnson: [00:02:30]	So how does Product-level TURTLEDOVE work? Let’s look at an individual who’s thinking about buying a new iPhone. He decides to look for one on his favorite retail website, ShopNow.com. Without Product-level TURTLEDOVE, after he leaves the store, he’ll still see ads for the iPhone he’s seeking, but that’s all.
Laurie da Silva: [00:03:00]	Now look at what happens when we apply the Product-level TURTLEDOVE concept. Our individual is also part of a group of interested iPhone buyers. And as a group, these buyers not only wanna buy the iPhone, but the accessories that support it, such as charging cables. These cables are now displayed on the same ad page as the iPhone. And the individual is exposed to a new product that may fit the consumer’s profiles, while maintaining privacy guarantees. This privacy preserving methods prevents micro-targeting, and cross-site tracking.
Richard Johnson: [00:03:30]	So can you create a personalized ad without the use of cookies? By using RTB House’s contribution to The Privacy Sandbox, the answer is yes. You can find more detailed information about this new way of personalizing your ads at blog.rtbhouse.com. Thanks for watching.