Reject All: As Cookies Crumble, 'Personified' Advertising Can Forge A New Path

In one of the biggest turnabouts in digital advertising history, targeting based on identifiers is squarely on the endangered species list due to the pressure from fed-up privacy-conscious consumers and regulators. Starting in 2018 with the European Union’s GDPR, which requires companies to get users’ explicit consent to access their device IDs, a grassroots groundswell of pressure has led to this current state whereby the digital advertising industry awaits Google’s inevitable deprecation of third-party cookies on its market-dominant Chrome browser in 2024 as the final nail in the cookie coffin. The ecosystem’s reaction has run the gamut of responses.