The death of 3rd party cookies and tracking

Have you heard of “intent-based marketing”? According to an article by Sara Fischer, It’s Dotdash Meredith’s response to the alleged death of the 3rd party cookie.

To understand how this works, let’s start with how things used to work.

You visit a website, say 123.com, and 123.com participates in an ad network, called ads4everybody.com. If you’ve ever been on any site that participates in the ads4everybody network, you would already have their cookie in your web browser. That’s a 3rd party cookie because you’re not on ads4everybody.com, you’re on 123.com.

Every time you do something on any site that participates in the ads4everybody.com network, it sends more data into your profile. After a while, ads4everybody.com knows – or guesses – a lot about you, so it can target ads to your specific interests.

I said “your profile,” but it’s supposed to be anonymized. Ads4everybody pretends they don’t know it’s you – they just have an ID for you. An anonymous id. Wink wink.

When web browsers block 3rd party cookies, they block the ads4everybody.com cookie, because you’re not on that site. But the web browser can read the 123.com cookie, because you are on that site.

Got it?

So 123.com can put a 1st party cookie in your browser and track what you do on the 123.com site.

Now let’s say 123.com is one of the 40 sites owned by Dotdash Meredith. All 40 of those sites collect information with 1st-party cookies and feed that information into a central database. That central database – with all the information from those 40 sites – can put people in audience segments and make predictions about their interests and likely behavior.

So it’s basically the same thing as an advertising platform using 3rd party cookies, it’s just that it only works on sites owned by Dotdah Meredith.

They claim they’re not using cookies at all. But they’re using the word “cookies” to mean 3rd-party cookies – and you have to watch out for that.

If they didn’t want to use cookies, they could use browser fingerprinting.

Here’s how that works. When you visit a website, your browser makes a request to the server. That request includes a lot of data, like your IP address, the browser you’re using, your operating system, screen resolution, active plugins, language, time zone, etc. All those settings create a fingerprint that’s close enough to being unique.

If all 40 Dotdash Meredith sites tie online behavior to that fingerprint, and then send that fingerprint to their central database, it accomplishes the same thing. They can follow your profile across all Dotdash Meredith sites.

I asked someone at D/Cipher – which is this ad system from DDM – about how this all works, and here’s what she said.

We target content, not people. The output of D/Cipher is recommended site taxonomies which we use for contextual targeting (opposed to 1P or 3P based audience segments).

That makes it sound like a content recommendation engine to me, but I’ll follow up and try to parse that out.

The bottom line, however, is the death of the 3rd party cookie does not mean the death of tracking.

Sources
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/16/dotdash-meredith-debuts-intent-based-ad-targeting-tool