In January 2020 (does anyone remember what the world was like then?!) Google made the announcement that in 2-years' time, they were going to sunset the 3rd-party cookie in its Chrome browser.

This announcement got a lot of attention in the advertising industry. While Safari and Firefox had already committed to a default of blocking 3rd party cookies, keeping the cookie out of Chrome was a huge call. It is by far the world's most used web browser, holding a hair under 65% global penetration. That's a vast amount of digital activity to render untrackable and a huge population made untargetable by one company's decision.

The obligatory columns and comments in trades and at conferences -- such as was able in the brief period before the COVID quarantine -- were written and made about the need for better privacy protection and targeting techniques. The call for more sound personal data controls and less invasive methods of targeting had been made before. It's been made repeatedly over the years, whenever there is a data breach or a corporate violation of our collective trust. Remember Cambridge Analytica, for example? But Google's move meant things were really going to have to change.

At the time of their announcement, Google did offer some hope to the millions of organisms that live off the Great Google Barrier Reef of tracking and targeting. Google said that it was exploring alternative technologies that would enable a level of tracking and targeting that are less invasive by being less user specific but would continue to allow the rest of the ecosystem to have a modicum of anonymous tracking so advertisers can still know if their ads are working or not.

Fast forward a year and a couple of months... at the beginning of this week Google's David Temkin said that they don't plan on developing or using alternative identifiers after all.

The reaction hasn't been a rending of garments or a gnashing of teeth by the unrighteous at the end of this age, exactly. But eyebrows the size of Eugene Levy's have been raised high. The the move portends big changes in the way the digital universe is monitored and how that can translate into cross-channel targeting. Google's decision doesn't mean that the rest of the industry has to do without its own form of identification of target audiences, but it does mean a large part of space becomes increasingly opaque.

There's a lot of gobbledygook about FLoC (federated learning of cohorts... don't ask... we can talk about that another time) and how all platforms and publishers are free to continue to use their own 1st party data as best they can to accomplish data-driven goals. But what's really happening?

Has Google decided this to enhance its image as a good corporate citizen? To ante up on the initial "don't be evil" ethos the company advocated? To be proactively compliant with the growing regulation governments seek to impose of use of personal data?

A few observations, in no particular order:

Google practically owns the world’s search market, with its original service and YouTube.
Google has user data on a vast array of people's behavior, and the entry point for that behavior is by virtue of search and YouTube.
DoubleClick click/DCM supports over 50% of the adserving market, meaning a majority of digital ads are delivered by Google.
Google has often been the invisible, and sometimes not so invisible hand, of privacy policy development. GDPR and CCPA were shaped in part by Google.
Google’s operating system for MOS hovers just over 70%.
Google’s operating system for Smart and connected TV is officially a bit over 10%, but unofficially closer to 40%.
Chrome has a hair under 65% global penetration.
All media is moving to be connected to an IP, which means it's connected to a machine-readable ecosystem.
The endpoints of the ecosystem are devices.
The devices all have IDs.
The devices are running Google’s OS.
Google has optics on the entire media universe, including the universe’s largest ID graph, that reads across every major media.

Even if a closed garden, the garden is so large, you’ll never see the walls. It'll be like that village in that crappy M. Night Shyamalan movie "The Village.

While many have died at the ramparts trying to guess Google's real motives over the years, I think it's safe to say that they are positioning hold fast an enormous part of the media universe, including TV. As more TV becomes CTV and buying gets committed on a trade desk or DSP, a lot of advertisers are going to throw up their hands and say, "fuck it, I’ll put more of my schedules here since I already do so much with Google Ads, anyway, and I’ll at least be able to get a universal view of audience and activity in one place across multiple platforms in GA360 for a pretty big chunk of my audience, and it’s just too much to think about dealing with the moving parts outside of the Google walled garden." I’ve seen clients go 80%+ all in on Google because of the unity of the buying platform and analytics, even if the advertiser understands intellectually that Google grades its own homework and doesn’t let you study with books from any library but theirs. Companies are and will continue to attempt to provide optics on the media universe outside of Google; Lotame’s Panorama ID, or Trade Desk's Unified ID Solution 2.0, for example.

Because Google can effectively render their part of the universe as unobservable while being able to see out across the rest of the media expanse. They have better -- and more -- 1st party data than all their advertisers combined. And if as an advertiser you operate outside that walled garden, Google effectively becomes the dark matter of the advertising universe, exerting extraordinary gravity but unseen by standard tools of detection.

Something else to consider. This could mean that Google, after decades of collecting and observing data, has concluded that microspecific audience data isn't particularly meaningful. It suggests an admission that the person-level targeting determinism isn’t necessary. Google now has enough optics on everything to conclude that granular targeting specificity isn’t the most important way to impact business through advertising. It’s all about reach, and reach means crowds, and crowds are more about fluid dynamics than they are about a particular collision of atoms.

Hence this move to "cohorts." This is a tacit admittance that the efforts of one-to-one and personalization do not produce results that outstrip more general segment targeting. Knowing that someone is a club-footed home-office radiologist who pitches left handed for the El Paso Diablos doesn't get that customer to like your brand of toilet paper better or buy more of it. People aren't looking for a deeper relationship with their mayonnaise. If you're McDonald's, you want to reach people with mouths; if you are Crest, you want people with teeth in those mouths.

Where does this take us? If I knew, I'd be a rich man. Maybe Google seeks to become the dominant media channel for advertisers. Maybe Google starts trading data for access to content with the big traditional media companies. Maybe Google creates an alternative audience-based currency, beating Nielsen at its own game?

Whatever it is, you can be sure it's going to reconfigure the stars and planets enough for us to have to draw new constellations.

And now, for your enjoyment, a throwback to one of the internet's first memes. [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940]