Fall of Third-Party Cookies and the Ascendancy of Walled Gardens
‍

In the evolving world of digital marketing, major changes are underway, especially with the gradual phase-out of third-party cookies. Big tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and soon Google, are eliminating these cookies from their browsers and systems.

Traditionally, third-party cookies have been a key tool for advertisers on a number of fronts. They allow for the tracking of user behavior across various websites and apps, enabling the creation of detailed user profiles. These profiles are then used to deliver highly personalized ads in an effort to drive increased engagement.

Third-party cookies have also been crucial for measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, including tracking conversions and attributing them to specific ad interactions. Without them, advertisers will face difficulties in accurately measuring campaign performance and surfacing optimization opportunities. As third-party cookies become less available, multi-touch attribution models will become less reliable.

Enter the Walled Garden. Walled gardens in advertising are platforms that impose strict control over their ecosystems, particularly regarding data. Their invaluable customer data is kept secure within their digital boundaries. Tech powerhouses like Google, Meta, and Amazon are at the forefront, providing a one-stop hub for marketers with access to a wealth of data and centralized audience management.

Walled gardens provide marketers with a goldmine of continuously updated, compliant first-party data. This enables the execution of highly-targeted and personalized ad campaigns within these platforms, without the worry of breaching data privacy laws. Among these walled gardens, Amazon is uniquely poised to prosper. Armed with its vast collection of first-party shopper, streaming, and lifestyle data, Amazon offers advertisers insights grounded in real consumer behaviors on its platform.

For brands, harnessing the power of Amazon's Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is a strategic maneuver to sail smoothly in the post-third-party-cookie era. Amazon's DSP utilizes its first-party data to deliver impactful campaigns for advertisers to foster brand awareness, retention, and growth. From a measurement perspective, advertisers are then able to ingest both campaign data and first party conversion data into Amazon’s Marketing Cloud (data clean room) to perform custom attribution and conversion analysis at a user level to help gauge the performance of their campaigns.

While the future of advertising in a cookie less world is uncertain, Amazon is certainly going to play a pivotal role in providing scalable solutions to the challenges of this new era in digital marketing.