Is it time to reconsider first-party cookies?

Consolidation in the industry and the increased importance of quality audience data is again raising privacy issues. Can first-party cookies help keep data private?


This week's acquisition of Adify got me thinking again about data ownership issues. It seems like a lifetime ago when I stood up before a group of fellow agency professionals at an industry conference and talked at length about how independent ad management companies were being gobbled up, and how that would affect our business in the future. By and large, nobody seemed to care about GoogleClick or MicroAtlas. I don't know whether or not anyone on the agency side will care enough to take action.

There's an inherent conflict of interest in companies that own ad sales operations as well as those businesses that house performance and audience data for the advertisers they sell to. That's why ad management companies were careful to explain to their customer base that PII (personally identifiable information) would be firewalled from prying eyes. Still, if you tend to be cynical about these kinds of things, the mere ownership should bother you enough to make you want to look into alternatives.

Could one of those alternatives be first-party cookies?

Back in the day, this was one of the potential solutions we discussed when widespread ad-blocking became the norm. If most of the ads online came from a handful of ad servers, anyone writing an ad-stripping application could easily distinguish between ad requests and content requests and thus make something that would enable people to surf the web nearly ad-free.

I don't want to open that can of worms again. I merely want to call attention to the notion that we've considered first-party cookies before.

Here's the idea: Instead of serving ads from a central location, they're served from an advertiser's own domain. Since one of the HTTP ground rules is that cookies can only be read or altered by the user or by servers that set them, serving from one's own domain would do a reasonably good job of ensuring that audience data assets stay with an advertiser.

Here's the problem: Moving to first-party cookies used to require a technology overhaul on the part of advertisers and agencies. Most advertisers want to handle ad serving by paying a usage-based fee to an independent ad serving provider, rather than by getting into the ad serving business themselves. But, as I mentioned, the independents aren't really independent anymore, save for a few smaller players. So big publisher-owned ad serving companies have full-campaign visibility into advertiser initiatives (and often have a lengthy history as well).

If advertisers served ads from their own domains, we could eliminate the notion of a provider other than the advertiser having full-campaign visibility into the audience and its behavior. (Sure, if you run half your ad budget on a large network provider, that network will have visibility into the portion of the campaign that they run, but there's very little we can do to fix that at this point in the game.)

Less-established ad serving players, like TruEffect, are betting heavy on the first-party cookie approach. It makes me wonder whether agencies can help preserve their relevance as data analysts and guardians of client marketing intelligence by adopting this approach.

What do you think? Is it time to look at first-party cookies again?