Ep. 107 Lessons from the Loss of Third-Party Cookies on the Web

Marketers for web browsers and apps are facing analogous transitions in their worlds as Google Chrome is doing away with third-party cookies by the end of 2023. Today’s guest is here to share what app marketers can learn from this parallel industry and how to better prepare for what’s to come.

Sarah Polli is the Senior Director of Marketing Technology at Hearts & Science, a global marketing agency. Sarah began her career in digital media 10 years ago at the Washington Post.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Google Podcasts

• What’s it been like to experience the growth at Heart & Science over the last 5-6 years firsthand and what would you attribute it to?
• What got you into marketing technology and what do you still find interesting about it?
• Tell us what’s going on with Chrome.
• When these changes happened with Safari and Mozilla around 2018, did marketers shift their spend to Chrome or have you seen marketers actively working towards solutions since 2018 to present?
• Was it possible to measure the impact of those campaigns? Or were you using proxies to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?
• How do you guide your partners through what’s going to happen? What are smart marketers doing today?
• What does it mean to be open and agile to you?

• 7:08 Sarah’s background
• 9:36 The growth of Hearts & Science
• 11:30 What keeps MarTech interesting
• 13:09 Changes with Google Chrome
• 15:30 The loss of third-party cookies since 2018
• 18:55 First-party data: the new gold
• 19:58 How Hearts & Science is preparing its partners
• 28:11 On being open and agile

(14:30-14:53) “[Google] Chrome is actively building these APIs and we should start to see them being released toward the end of next year. So really 2023 for advertisers will be the big year of understanding these APIs--what do they look like, what are the ones for targeting, what is for retargeting, what is for measurement, and testing to see what they look like against what it is we have today, and determining how we want to proceed in the future.”

(16:46-17:14) “The CPMs for Safari drastically went down. So smart advertisers, and we did this with our clients, you could take what was happening in Chrome, understand your audiences and use that to then go and target Safari by similar audiences, take advantage of that CPM decrease and still reach these users instead of just completely ignoring those people. Similar to what’s happening today with iOS apps and Android.”