Third-party cookie deprecation lets Google please privacy advocates while harming competitors.  Lest the competitive benefits become too clear, the company is eager to show that advertisers can get acceptable results from alternatives like contextual targeting, interest-based cohorts, and publishers’ first-party data.  It just released a test concluding exactly that: ad campaigns without third party cookies performed only a little worse than those using cookies. (Details here.) They mention but don’t stress that the test doesn’t consider lost measurement or retargeting.

What must worry Google above all is the decline in search marketing itself.  You’ll recall we reported last week that search’s share of U.S. Internet ad spend has been falling.  Today I’ll add this Jungle Scout report that people are starting their online shopping searches less with “search engines” (presumably mostly Google) and Amazon, and more with Walmart and TikTok.  Yikes!

Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.