Lumen's solution now that the cookie's crumbled

Google has announced that it is phasing out the use of third party cookies from Chrome starting this February. It joins Safari and Firefox in ending this invasive practice, which is fully in line with the direction of travel favoured by the ICO here in the UK and the CCPA in California. Rob Webster of Canton Media has a good take on this issue here, and Dave Carpenter of Goodstuff has, if anything, an even better one here.

This is already having an impact in the market. Shares in Criteo, which is heavily reliant on retargeting people using these third party cookies, dropped 15.9% in a single day on the news. This is a real change, which will have a real impact on how ads are bought and sold.

So, in the absence of third party cookies, how will advertisers target their advertising in the future? One way is to talk to quality publishers directly to buy what is called ‘first party’ cookie data, which is still legal. Another way is to buy high impact ad formats such as Just Premium or FreeWalls, that are more likely to be noticed – by everyone who goes to the site.

But we think the best way is to target the context rather than the consumer. As we know, seeing is selling, and ads on some sites are much more likely to be seen than the same ads on other sites. Lumen’s attention stack technology allows you to target your ads to high attention sites, using our pre-bid contextual targeting technology. This is what clients like British Gas and the Co-operative supermarket have seen such success with over the last few months. Cookies, who needs them?

Get in touch if you would like to learn how we can help you get an unfair share of attention in a post-cookie world.