Adam Ortman is CEO and founder of Kinetic319, a leading marketing agency rooted in cutting-edge strategy and consumer psychology.
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For years, marketers prepared for the death of the third-party cookie as if they were preparing for the arrival of Y2K. They planned, fretted and planned some more.
Then, the deadline changed. And then it changed again. In April 2025, Google finally said it would keep its existing approach to third-party cookies in Chrome rather than introduce a new stand-alone prompt or eliminate them entirely.
So now, in 2026, we still aren’t living in a completely cookie-less world. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework requires permission before tracking users across other companies’ apps and websites. And the impact has been enormous: AppsFlyer’s research found that only 40% of users shown Apple’s tracking prompt consented. When accounting for users who couldn’t receive the prompt or had already disabled tracking, that figure dropped to just 30%.
Meanwhile, privacy regulation has continued to expand across the U.S.; by mid-2026, 23 states had enacted comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Browsers, operating systems and platforms alike are putting more control in the consumer’s hands.
While cookies haven’t disappeared entirely, marketers shouldn’t assume that they will always have a complete record of every consumer interaction. I don’t think we should build our strategies around getting that level of visibility back. Here’s what I think we should do instead.
Stop Trying To Re-create What We Had
I’ve noticed that when a signal disappears, our first instinct is generally to find another signal that behaves exactly like it. But I think we need to ask a more basic question: How much did those signals really tell us in the first place?
A cookie could tell us that a browser interacted with an ad, or help us follow activity across parts of the digital journey. But it couldn’t always tell us whether that exposure led someone to a purchase, which channel had more influence, or whether that customer was already going to convert.
As signal loss increases, those limitations are harder to ignore. Ninety-five percent of advertising and data decision-makers expected continued signal loss and/or privacy legislation, while more than half expected greater difficulty tracking conversions, attributing campaign performance and measuring ROI.
Rather than reconstructing the old tracking ecosystem one identifier at a time, we should spend more energy building measurement systems that work when some of the data is missing.
First-Party Data Only Works If Consumers See The Value
Naturally, this pushes more attention toward first-party data. Seventy-one percent of brands, agencies and publishers were either growing or planning to grow their first-party datasets compared with 41% just two years prior.
This makes sense: Purchases, subscriptions, loyalty programs, registrations, preference centers and other direct interactions give brands information they don’t have to rent from someone else. However, “collect more first-party data,” by itself, isn’t much of a strategy because the value of that data depends heavily on how consumers feel about giving it to you in the first place.
Consumers generally respond well to relevance, but there’s a point where personalization can cross from useful into unsettling. Almost all of us have had that moment when an ad feels a little too specific and the reaction shifts from “That’s convenient” to “How do you know that about me?”
Personalized advertising, as researched in the “personalization paradox,” can improve response when consumers understand how their information was collected. Covert forms of data collection can create feelings of vulnerability and reduce effectiveness.
If we want consumers to share more information directly with us, there has to be a clear reason for them to do it. A loyalty program that saves someone money makes sense, but so do personalized recommendations, easier purchasing, better service or genuinely useful content.
Measure Business Impact, Not Digital Breadcrumbs
The loss of individual signals should push us toward better measurement. I’m a big believer in layered measurement: attribution for fast directional feedback, incrementality testing for causation and marketing mix modeling for broader budget decisions and statistical foresight.
None of those tools, by themselves, need to answer every question. That’s the entire point. Incrementality testing compares outcomes between groups that were and were not exposed to advertising, helping us determine whether media caused additional results rather than simply appearing somewhere along the customer journey. Marketing mix modeling takes an even broader view; Google’s Meridian model, for example, uses aggregated data rather than individual cookies to estimate marketing impact across channels.
Platforms are filling some measurement gaps through modeling as well. Google’s Consent Mode can use modeled conversions when observable data is unavailable because users decline consent, subject to eligibility and implementation requirements.
We’re taking a similar approach with KiQ360, Kinetic319’s attribution modeling solution. By using Bayesian statistical models to analyze historical media spend, sales, seasonality and other factors, KiQ360 helps estimate how different channels contribute to business results, even when individual customer journeys can’t be tracked from beginning to end.
In any event, I wouldn’t treat modeled data as interchangeable with observed behavior, but I also wouldn’t dismiss it simply because it isn’t a perfect user-level record.
Privacy Should Change Media Strategy, Too
Signal loss affects where and how brands spend just as much as it affects measurement. Advertisers are shifting toward environments like connected TV, retail media, search and social platforms that rely less on cookies and offer access to first-party data or embedded measurement capabilities.
Closed platforms may offer useful measurement and audience tools, but we shouldn’t replace dependence on third-party cookies with dependence on a handful of platforms.
Personally, I still want diversification and controlled experiments. I still want performance evaluated against business outcomes such as incremental revenue, customer acquisition, retention and profitability rather than whichever conversion metric happens to be easiest to report.
The privacy era is forcing marketers to give up some visibility, but I don’t think that means accepting less accountability. If anything, it should push us to ask harder questions about what our media is genuinely accomplishing. Cookies might stick around longer than expected, but the assumption that marketers deserve unlimited consumer-level visibility won’t.
Our measurement strategies, then, shouldn’t depend on getting it back.
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