IAB Europe, the leading European-level industry association for the digital advertising and marketing ecosystem, has today released its ‘Guide to the Post-Third-Party Cookie Era’, to prepare brands, agencies, publishers and tech intermediaries for the much-anticipated post-third-party cookie advertising ecosystem.

The guide, which has been developed by experts from IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee, provides level-setting background into the current use of digital advertising cookies, the contributing factors to their depletion and an overview of the alternative solutions that are currently available.

Contributors to the Guide, including Adform, BBC Global News, CNN International, DoubleVerify,  Foursquare, Omnicom Media Group (OMD), Oracle Data Cloud and Xandr, amongst others, have collaborated to provide a view from across the value-chain on the impact these changes will have in areas including digital advertising execution, measurement, and ad verification, along with tangible examples for how stakeholders can contribute towards the solutions industry will take forward.

Commenting on the industry’s need for an essential guide and the role that IAB Europe will play, Townsend Feehan, CEO, IAB Europe said“The depletion of third-party cookies will bring about fundamental changes to our industry and as the European voice for digital advertising and marketing, our role is to navigate these changes, educate the wider market and help our members contribute to the solutions. The Guide we are releasing today is an initial education piece and we will continue to work with our members to feed into industry initiatives such as  IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc and W3C.”

Miles Pritchard, managing partner data management solutions, OMD EMEA, who contributed to the Guide added “The deprecation of third-party cookies will create fundamental changes for how advertisers manage their campaigns in areas including audience targeting and retargeting, frequency capping and attribution. Ensuring OMD has a voice in these discussions is essential for both our advertising clients and the broader industry.”

These industry changes will also impact the publishing industry and contributor Emily Roberts, programmatic trading manager, BBC Global News, added “The IAB Europe Guide makes clear that first-party data will be key to enable advertisers to understand their audiences, so publishers will need to reorganise their data collection and extension strategies to meet this need. By maintaining value in the open Internet, publishers are able to focus on their core business - creating premium and trusted content that will keep consumer's happy and deliver engaged audiences to advertisers.”

Chair of the IAB Europe Programmatic Trading Committee and DoubleVerify senior director of business development, David Goddard, concluded “As an industry we should stop attempting to ‘solve’ for the loss of third-party cookies, but instead recognise that these changes are predicated on the direction of privacy laws globally. To realise the full potential of this natural evolution it is essential that all parts of the value-chain work together to provide solutions that work across the whole ecosystem and keeping users at the centre of this conversation to build trust. The IAB Europe Guide creates common understanding of the issues to facilitate this approach and the Programmatic Trading Committee will be updating the Guide on a regular basis to provide the latest information and guidance on market alternatives to third-party cookies.”

The Guide follows IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day which was held last week (28th April). Over 1,500 people attended the event virtually to hear from leaders on the developments and trends within Programmatic Advertising. A dedicated session was held to discuss the depletion of the third-party cookie with digital leaders sharing their thoughts on the impact and alternative solutions. You can watch the panel recording and access the audience Q&A here.

The IAB Europe ‘Guide to the Post-Third-Party Cookie Era’ is available here.