Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome. They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment. The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.
It’s not your imagination: good men (and women) are hard to find. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 77% of marketers said there’s a talent shortage in their organization. In bad news for English majors everywhere, data and analytics skills top the list while creative and social media roles are at the bottom.
Audience measurement is a challenge across all channels, even when cookies aren’t involved. Nielsen in particular has struggled to keep up with TV audiences, as delivery methods expanded beyond linear broadcasts to streaming networks, mobile devices, and on-line video. Their latest extension is “Four-Screen Ad Deduplication”, which adds deduplicated YouTube viewers to its Total Ad Ratings data.
There’s probably no limit to Amazon’s greed – because capitalism – but there are constraints as governments regulate BigTech more aggressively and, just maybe, the free market works its wonders. Amazon cited “seller sentiment related to the fee” in its statement pulling back from its planned 2% fee on sellers who don’t use its Prime fulfillment services. But looming antitrust cases likely had something to do with it.