• by Larissa Faw , October 30, 2020

A majority of marketers from retail, financial services, CPG, restaurant and travel industries are “very” or “moderately” reliant on third-party cookies, tracking codes created by domains other than the one the user is visiting at the time. Both Apple and Google have announced their plans to stop collecting this data.

Publicis’ Epsilon is releasing research to further understand marketers’ perceptions, readiness and concerns regarding the future deprecation of third-party cookies as well as changes to mobile ad identifiers (MAIDs) like Apple’s IDFA.

For one, they are not happy about it. Marketers have a more negative perception of Google (38%) and Apple (44%) as a result of the announced changes, with 67% having negative feelings about the pending changes and 44% responding that they are disappointed with the plans. In fact, 69% of respondents say the impact is bigger than prior privacy changes, the GDPR or CCPA.

Seven in 10 believe digital advertising will be adversely affected by these changes and will take a step backwards.

Marketers, perhaps most notably, feel these decisions will not benefit anyone. Nearly two-thirds believe the changes will not help consumers (62%) or will result in little to no improvement to consumers’ control of personal data (63%). Most think consumers will receive a less personalized ad experience (55%) and feel privacy concerns will persist (50%).

Although less than half (46%) of respondents are “very prepared” for these upcoming alterations, 69% are taking active steps to prepare. Their top three actions include building a customer data platform (67%), strategizing around first-party data (62%), and on building out a private ID graph (60%).

Epsilon partnered with Phronesis Partners to conduct an online survey of 259 U.S. marketers who are “key decision-makers” or “influencers” for digital advertising in their organizations across the retail, financial services, CPG, restaurants and travel industries. The survey ran from August 26 through September 15, 2020. Respondents were screened to be at least “somewhat familiar” with the deprecation of third-party cookies.

The full report can be accessed here.