Cookies

Digital tracking beacons that are practically opioids for advertisers.

It is a travesty that such a glorious name is used for such a maligned technology.

Cookies, when prepared correctly, are among the most delicious of humanity’s inventions. The Nestle Toll House Cookie recipe should be one of the first forms of communication shared with an extraterrestrial race so that they know, whatever their digestive systems, that we are a crafty and benevolent species. We should also tell them it’s okay if they use 1/4 of a cup less granulated sugar and 1/4 of a cup extra brown sugar, but only if their alien palates prefer a hint of extra sweet, smoky depth in their baked goods. Otherwise, the recipe is perfect as it is.

Marketers had to ruin it.

Cookies, marketers will tell you at the dullest of cocktail parties, make ads more relevant for you. Are you a vegetarian who keeps getting those ads for Omaha Steaks? Do you identify as female but can’t visit three news sites without getting bombarded with male razor ads? Are you a raccoon who gets ads for stores that look inviting, but the stores are only open during the daytime? What do those retailers think you are, a ring-tailed lemur?

If that raccoon didn’t go through the trash and delete all the cookies, then diurnal retailers would probably know to avoid targeting nocturnal prospects.

Cookies are snippets of code that track people most of the time they visit websites. These trackers could come directly from the site you visit (a first-party cookie), or it could come from one of the countless advertising or analytics companies hitching a ride on that publisher (a third-party cookie).

Given how few ads you notice, you probably don’t process how relevant or irrelevant the ads are. You ignore them. It is also possible to target relevant ads without cookies. Facebook, for instance, relies on information provided by its users, and those same users provide other signals such as by liking pages.

Third-party cookies are likely to be phased out now that Google signaled in January 2020 that Chrome will no longer welcome them. Advertisers may lament this shift, but there will always be ways to target prospects – even if it means using direct mail. I mean mail (see also: Direct Mail, page 14).