Cookies crumble, privacy prevails: Marketing’s new playbook

Remember when cookies ran the internet? For over two decades, a tiny text file did most of our heavy lifting: drop a cookie, follow a shopper, and shower her/him with ads, calling it ‘personalisation’. Easy, until it wasn’t!

After years of threatening to take away the cookies, in 2024, Google flipped the script, allowing Chrome users to decide who tracks them. Safari and Firefox had already slammed the door on third-party cookies. Regulators circled, consumers chanted, ‘my data, my rules’.

The reprieve doesn’t restore the old playbook—it simply proves that privacy, not the cookie, is the issue. The message was clear—the future of marketing belonged to brands that would treat privacy as a promise, not paperwork.

Why privacy suddenly mattered (to everyone)?

People are tired of feeling stuck in a retargeting maze. They will still share data, but only if the value is crystal clear and the guardrails are obvious.

Meanwhile, laws from California to New Delhi make ‘ask forgiveness later’ a budget-breaking strategy. Regulation keeps raising the bar: GDPR fines set records, California’s CPRA expands deletion and opt-out rights, and India’s DPDP Act classifies location and financial data as ‘sensitive’.

Even the tech is revolting—ad-blockers, VPNs, and multi-device habits leave third-party cookies gasping for air. Translation: respect becomes a growth lever, not a nice-to-have.

Enter people-based marketing. Instead of guessing which laptop belongs to which shopper, you stitch every consented touchpoint—app log-ins, loyalty scans, help-desk chats—into one living profile. Sonia on mobile and Sonia in-store? Same person, one conversation.

Done right, identity resolution means no more creepy déjà-vu banners and a lot more ‘Oh wow, they actually get me’. The result is personalisation with permission baked in—that feels helpful, not creepy—and it scales only when the brands have a solid first-party data strategy.

The winning strategies

First-party data is the most resilient data is the information a customer gives you directly. Leverage this to its full potential.

Loyalty programmes, personalised content hubs, and transparent preference centres—all create reasons for users to log in and share. Once collected, that data must be cleansed, deduplicated, and stored in a customer data platform that can surface a single, actionable view of the individual.

Identity resolution at the time of customer onboarding is a critical enabler for people-based marketing, and if this is not done right, the problems compound through the customer life-cycle.

Collaborate in data clean rooms. Clean rooms are quickly becoming the collaboration workhorse of privacy-first marketing.

They allow brands and partners—retail media networks, publishers, and even measurement vendors—to match hashed identifiers and analyse overlap without exposing raw records. Whether you are closing the loop on attribution or planning a joint promotion, clean rooms let you do it with the confidence that sensitive information never leaves its secure enclave.

Advanced analytics and AI are here for the long run. First-party data is the fuel; privacy-preserving AI is the engine. Predictive models rank customers by churn risk or lifetime value, while natural-language systems generate copy variants on the fly.

Techniques such as federated learning keep raw data on the device, and differential privacy adds statistical ‘noise’, so individuals stay hidden even as the model improves. Brands that combine first-party data with these methods already report double-digit lifts in conversion while reducing data-privacy risk.

Building a privacy-first culture is crucial. Technology fails without the right mindset. Leading brands publish plain-language notices, surface consent choices at every touch-point, and empower service teams to act on data requests instantly.

Surviving in a privacy-focused world

The cookie may have dodged extinction, but the privacy revolution is well underway. Marketers who prioritise customer identity, invest in first-party data, collaborate through clean rooms, harness AI responsibly, and hard-wire transparency into their culture will deliver the personalised experiences customers love, without crossing lines customers now recognise and enforce.

Those who cling to yesterday’s tactics will find that the highest price of ignoring privacy isn’t a fine; it is becoming irrelevant in a modern marketplace.

— Lakshmana Gnanapragasam, SVP - Analytics, Epsilon.