• by Jim Meskauskas , March 10, 2005

The cookie has been a subject of debate from the moment of its inception and throughout most of the life of the commercial Web. From the time the first crumb of a cookie allowed for tracking of actions taken by a particular individual surfing the Web, marketers and advertisers grew excited by the prospects. Tracking media consumption at a user level foretold of great things to come in marketing.

Cookies heralded an era of endless data being able to tell advertisers any story they wanted to hear about potential consumers. There were, and still are, privacy killjoys among the anointed digerati that admonish cookies for the ills they allow marketers to perform, in particular the invisible tether cookies can form between a user and certain kinds of spyware that leash the individual to aggressive advertisers.

But you ask most marketers about cookies and they'll say that cookies are good things. Cookies can improve the user experience by giving individuals access to sites they have been to before without having to run a gauntlet of registrations and passwords and user IDs. They allow advertisers to serve more relevant advertising to individuals based on that user's experience, thereby doing that individual a service by offering them messaging related to products or services that person is interested in.

Basically, marketers think cookies are a good thing.

But there are now a cadre of browsers and blockers and freeware that kill the cookie. There are tools that nearly everyone can now use which nullifies the cookie by either removing it from our systems or keeping it away from us all together.

Though I've not been able to find any reliable statistics on just how many people sweep their systems clean of cookies, there is little doubt that people are using them, and will continue to use them in greater and greater numbers.

This has many marketers in the online media space worried that the best means we have of tracking and targeting audiences will be rendered sterile and potentially take away from online media its primary killer app; namely, the precision targeting that has been the primary point of differentiation between online media and all other media.

Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. Maybe the removal of ostensibly reliable data-based targeting isn't so bad for advertising. Could it be that by increasing the 'X' factor of marketing and media planning we are forced to concentrate harder and with greater intelligence on the problem of marketing, with a more holistic ken turned towards audiences and their life with media?

Looking for ways to fight consumers' use of tools like cookie sweepers, pop-up blockers, and the like just puts marketers in conflict with consumers. Fighting the very people you wish to make allies - be it as users of a product or service or an agent of word-of-mouth - is a destructive approach to marketing that will not serve the industry well.

And perhaps it is the case that by relying less heavily on data that might be suspect anyway, advertisers and their agencies develop smarter marketing that takes into account the "immeasurable" aspects of a consumer's engagement. By removing the security blanket that an abundance of data provides could lead to advertisers working harder to understand consumers in a way that contextualizes them within the whole of their world. This could lead to marketing communications that seek to place the product or service within the construct of a consumer's life rather than couching the product or service in a form that interrupts or obstructs it.

By taking away the crutch of data, advertisers might have to start thinking about their consumers as people rather than as click-streams. Marketers might be forced to look at ways of making their products to be a part of a person's life rather than a shrill obstacle to it.

There is no doubt that a good many data are beneficial to understanding consumers and how to best engage them. But too much concentration on data has led many marketers to lose the forest for the trees. Though a great deal of human behavior has been reduced to predictable variables of cause and effect, much of human behavior remains unknown and can only be addressed with interpretive skills, imagination, and faith.

Perhaps it is time to bring a little art back to advertising.