If You’re Confused, You’re Not Alone
There is a lot of information available to people who want to know more about how privacy-first approaches and data privacy regulations impact digital marketing. Unfortunately, a lot of that information is inaccurate, although the inaccuracies aren’t intentional. The policies, approaches, and technology advances are confusing, technical, and constantly in flux. Quimby Melton joined us on the Revenue Marketing Report to offer some clarity. “There is a lot of confusing information out there about privacy and the shift away from third-party data. I think people use the word ‘cookie’ as a catch-all word for all the ways we gather data digitally. We need to get more specific because these privacy changes impact more than just browser-level data storage like cookies, trackers, and pixels. To be cookie-free doesn’t mean that you’re immune from privacy-first disruption.” Before we dive into the other layers of data impacted by privacy laws, let’s talk about cookies. A website’s server creates cookies once your browser begins to load that website. The visit triggers information to be written to a file (cookie) in your browser that contains an id unique to your device. These files are generally shared between your browser and the website without altering the content or causing a subsequent action to occur on your machine. Cookies are what allow us to remain logged into a website the next time we visit, save our preferences so we can have a tailored browsing experience, and store information about what we’ve left in a cart or shopped for in the past. They also sometimes follow us around the internet, collecting a ton of data about what we view and interact with on the web. Different cookies last for different durations. Session cookies only last during a single active session and disappear once you navigate away from the website. Persistent cookies are either tracking cookies that are used to gather data over time to refine a user’s profile (think personalization) or authentication cookies, which record whether you are logged in and, if so, under which username and password. Persistent cookies are also divided into first-party (or generated by the website’s domain you are visiting) or third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are placed in the website’s code and use code generated by a different domain from the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies are used by some marketing analytics and retargeting companies (although some companies like CaliberMind use first-party cookies created by javascript to write and collect data) and some more malicious entities on the web.

How We Got into This Mess
“The Tragedy of Commons is an economics concept. It represents a situation in which individuals have unfettered access to a shared resource. Some examples are the unregulated common lands in 19th century Britain or the free rangelands here in the American West. Animals would eat all the grass, and as a result, the land is no longer useful. Overfishing cod caused a decades-long fisheries collapse,” Quimby explained. “Climate change is probably the ultimate example of the Tragedy of Commons, but on a banal level, think of public bathrooms. The lesson is that everyone’s inexpensive, easy-to-access property is no one’s property. When we use resources in an entirely self-interested way, we deplete the value of the resource. “The ways we’ve collected, stored, and distributed data over the last 30 years was very self-interested and uncoordinated. Human beings don’t like or trust the system, and it’s also failing technically. We have to ask how can we build a more compliant system that allows this important social resource, namely data, to flow more readily and sustainably for everyone involved, not just the advertisers.”What Things Will Look Like Post-Privacy (Maybe)
Depending on the person I’m speaking with, opinions on how drastically we’ll be impacted vary from very little to the sky is falling. Given indicators in the market, it’s wise to ask vendors their roadmap, but I’m not confident any of us can say exactly how things will shake out over the next five or more years.
For more on privacy trends and which skills marketers should embrace for upward mobility, listen to the full Revenue Marketing Report episode at the top of the article or anywhere you podcast.