• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 22, 2022

Much has been said and written about the demise of third-party marketing data, but Cisco Meraki's top marketer doesn't believe cookies will completely disappear. 

"I'm skeptical that the cookie is going to go completely away, to be honest,” says Rebecca Stone, Cisco Customer Solutions Marketing senior vice president and CMO of Cisco Meraki, a business unit focused on network security, during an interview with TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat.

"It's going to make it exponentially harder for companies to do business without thinking about building paywalls and doing things that allow them to capture customer information to manage relationships with advertisers,” she says. “The idea of moving into a cookieless world and building out privacy was designed to help minimize the power of some of the larger paywalls and walled gardens … I think it will have the reverse effect and give them more power because they will have the most first-party data.”

She envisions a world with more paywalls, walled gardens, and more silos. Rather than allowing markets to reach potential customers, it will require them to engage individually with each location.

“It sets us back a little bit in terms of understanding the customer,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important to capture those intent signals.”

Google has said it will delay its plan to phase out third-party cookies in its Chrome browser until late 2024 in an effort to help marketers and companies become more prepared.

Cookies are that small piece of code that a website drops in a user’s browser that helps marketers target ads.

Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox, wrote in a blog post--advertisers simply need more time to make the transition to Google’s cookie replacement. The idea is to expand testing for the Privacy Sandbox APIs before Google disables third-party cookies in Chrome.

Stone served as vice president of marketing for about five and a half years at LiveRamp. She has a strong understanding of the complexities in the ad-tech ecosystem.

Cisco has embraced customer reviews. The company has a dedicated team to manage reviews systematically across all product lines. The focus is driven by not being able to easily identify “non-hand raisers” and being able to acquire new customers. The other points to customers less likely to want to engage directly with the brand, but they want to understand what its customers say. It feels more like a trusted source coming from another customer. It’s called building a focus around credibility and authenticity.

“I had a boss once tell me that you can say five times something that a customer says once, and a potential customer is way more likely to believe what the one customer said once rather than what you say five times,” she said. “I embrace that philosophy.”