Confessions of a media buyer on Google’s third-party cookie U-turn and how it helped a ‘largely lazy’ industry innovate

By Kristina Monllos  •  April 25, 2025  •

In the latest edition of our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we talked with this buyer to get his take on the reversal, what it means for the industry and why, despite the headache, Google’s push to end cookies in Chrome likely made the ad industry innovate in ways that were needed.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

What was your first thought when the news was announced earlier this week?

I literally laughed out loud. We shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve tried to plan for this. We changed a lot. For five years, there was a lot of urgency. There was confusion. Now we have a conclusion. It wasn’t surprising really but it was a chuckle moment, for sure.

Why would you say it wasn’t surprising? Did you think Google was just going to kick the can down the road forever?

To be honest, kind of. We haven’t been relying on third-party cookies as much, year after year, so maybe the impact of [third-party cookies being removed from Chrome] was going to be less and less when they finally went and did it. But we expected them to keep finding reasons to delay. They’ve got a lot of big fish to fry with other company issues right now, too. Maybe that was not a factor at all here, but [it probably helps not to have] something else to potentially be called a monopoly right now.

Do you feel like you wasted a bunch of time learning about potential alternatives?

I knew you’d asked that question. Did we waste time? No. I think the industry did need to make these changes anyway. The frustrating part is probably how much of an intense time frame that seemed to put on all of that, right? I guess deadlines do get things done. Maybe we’re better off because there was like a — yes, constantly moving finish line — but something that was there.

We did go into a lot of rethinking as to like, “OK, well how can we be better?” A lot of good came from it. It got us thinking in new ways, not relying on data that was, in many ways, not great. We were mostly worried about what this meant for certain channels, for retargeting or how we can frequency cap across different platforms and all of that. That was scary at first, but we’ve just gotten better as an industry coming out of it.

I’d imagine you spent a lot of time on alternative IDs and the like. Can you give me an example of why you think that wasn’t wasted energy?

At first, we were really pushing clients into first-party data strategies [to manage a cookie-less future]. It was like, “OK, we’re going to need to rely more on this. It’s more valuable anyway. Let’s build up mechanisms for getting — not even getting control of that, but getting scale there and using it.” A lot of clients now are way better off on CRM or whatever they call their first-party data transformation.

We got so heavily reliant on behavioral data that we forgot about context. Not even just contextual targeting, but does this moment matter? I think that put us back into revisiting strategies there that weren’t just, “Oh, this is the right person. It’s also that right time, right mindset type of thing.” So [the looming deadline for third-party cookie deprecation gave] contextual targeting a reinvigorated role. It was something that we got away from for half a decade or so.

The other thing has been on measurement. How can we just get better on measurement overall? When the multi-touch attribution model was threatened because of this, could we find alternative methods incorporating mixed modeling and incrementality testing? Those are things that all got a lot stronger and were reinvented over the past five years. I do think it kept us on our toes quite a bit and in general, a lot of good has come from it, even though if you look back you’re kind of a little pissed that you were thrust into it unnecessarily.

Now that there’s no longer that looming deadline, what’s the current feeling?

There were certainly some things that were still going to be impacted like certain strategies we’d have to fully back out of. I don’t think that most of our strategies today relied on a ton of third-party cookie data, so we were in pretty good shape with both targeting and measurement and attribution. I don’t know if much changes for us, honestly. Other than, OK, we can keep some of the other things live maybe longer than we had intended to. I’m curious to see if there’s any kind of rollbacks tech partners do or now is there going to be a bigger movement to invest in building, any type of measurement or data, targeting off of third-party cookies again?

What have clients’ reactions been?

It was something CMOs were back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on. But most of my clients have this so far in the back of their heads now. It’s not a blip. I’ve not talked to any clients in the past few days about it directly. No one’s reached out.

What’s the takeaway from the last five or so years of back and forth?

I think the industry was — not overall but — largely lazy at that time. This forced some innovation. I don’t know that we’re gonna go all the way back with this being rolled back. I think someone’s probably gonna try to capitalize on it and, and we’ll see what that looks like. This made us in many ways smarter, probably more future-proof because there’s privacy legislation and changes that are gonna continue to come out anyway, which might make this all moot, right? We’re always waiting for more to come in that privacy realm anyway.

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