What the removal of third-party cookies will mean for contextual marketing
Outbrain’s head of programmatic business development Bostjan Spetic examines how the return of contextual marketing is about to make the industry better.
When it starts to rain in New York, all the street vendors suddenly start selling umbrellas. They appear on every street corner, nobody knows where they get them, but they sell extremely well – while it’s raining.
And that last part is important – without the context of the rain, umbrellas aren’t hot property.
In the early days of the internet, context was all we had – targeting banner ads at sites with an appropriate audience profile. Then we began to overutilise a mechanism called cookies and started chasing people around the web with ads. Many began popping up in inappropriate places, totally out of context, and the user experience was worse for it. But there’s a watershed moment coming where every marketer will need to start to embrace context again, when Google’s Chrome finally removes support for third-party cookies in late 2023(delayed from 2022).
