The identity landscape was dominated by Google announcements last year, centring on a cookie U-turn that left an uncertain roadmap for 2025. After years of delays to Google’s plans to phase out third-party cookies, the tech giant said it would instead allow Chrome users to choose their preferred cookie settings. But with an uncertain timeframe and ongoing regulatory involvement, industry players suggest Google has gone from driving the identity conversation to becoming a passenger in wider shifts towards privacy-centric solutions.
“Cookies have been insufficient for a long time; now they’re just becoming irrelevant,” comments Mathieu Roche, CEO and Co-Founder of ID5, an identification services provider. “And so it almost doesn’t matter when and if Google actually turns on the prompt and asks users to opt in or out, because I think the industry is moving on.”
“It isn’t even a Google thing, it’s an industry thing,” adds Geoff Copps, SVP Audience & Identity EMEA at Kinesso, an IPG-owned performance marketing agency. “The direction of travel is more privacy-safe, more identity-first solutions, and I think Google are really just part of that. I know they’re a huge part of that, but they are just part of the overall trend.”
No silver bullets
And as third-party cookies will remain in place for opted-in users, Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which was designed to replace cookies, looks less likely to be adopted than the tech giant had initially planned. Research from Criteo published in June 2024 suggested that less than 55 percent of publishers had adopted Privacy Sandbox, and that its use would reduce ad revenue by 60 percent. And in the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) latest report on the Privacy Sandbox, the UK regulator listed more than 60 specific concerns about the solution.
“I’ve never seen a single company being happy with the results of the testing they’ve done with Sandbox,” says ID5’s Mathieu Roche. “The announcement Google made in July was entitled ‘A New Path for Privacy Sandbox’. It’s really a dead end. And what’s happened in parallel is that alternative solutions to recognise customers, share data and operate at scale without cookies have emerged, like alternative IDs, clean rooms and contextual targeting.”
This has given rise to a plethora of different solutions for marketers and publishers to choose from. Last year, ID5 surveyed industry participants to gauge the most effective forms of ID solutions for a post-cookie environment, and found that deterministic signals (31 percent) were deemed more effective than probabilistic signals (6 percent) – while 63 percent of respondents favoured a combination of the two.
“If you’re going to have a successful identity strategy, it’s going to be a hybrid one,” agrees Kinesso’s Geoff Copps. While an email address provides an accurate identifier, he argues that deterministic identity is “not a silver bullet”, given the trade off in terms of scale. “You can’t really build an entire identity strategy off an email,” he adds. “You need probabilistic solutions around that.”
And for the sell-side, building ID solutions on deterministic data stands to benefit the walled garden platforms with vast numbers of logged-in users, accelerating the flow of ad spend into the hands of a few tech giants. According to WARC forecasts, by 2028, half of all global ad spend will be going to Meta, Amazon and Google.
“If we are replacing a cookie with an email address, it’s a great solution for the walled gardens, but not for the open web,” comments Mattia Fosci, privacy lawyer and founder of ID-free targeting business Anonymised. “Publishers will have at best 5 percent of their audience logged in. The walled gardens have everyone logged in. So we are essentially becoming even more of a satellite of the biggest logged-in user base.”
“Even if you’re News International, you’re never going to compete with the scale of Apple and Google,” adds James Rosewell, Co-Founder of Movement for an Open Web, a campaign group comprising advertisers, publishers and tech companies. “Those days are gone. The best you’re going to have is a walled flower pot.”
Expansion and contraction
Deterministic and probabilistic identifiers make up around 80 percent of ID solutions currently in market, according to Prohaska Consulting, and the total number of available ID solutions has risen from 74 in 2021 to 110 in 2024. And while ongoing uncertainty around cookies is likely to see more identity players enter the space, this year could see the start of consolidation in the market.
“There’s a very strong network effect,” notes Mathieu Roche. “Identity is effectively a currency. And so the more the more people use a currency, the more valuable the currency becomes. So I think as adoption accelerates for the top three or four ID solutions, we’re going to see more consolidation around a handful of globally available solutions.”
And Mattia Fosci expects the limitations of solutions currently in market to drive that consolidation. “There are over 100 different addressability or ID solutions, which might have more scale but less accuracy, or they can perform targeting but not measurement,” he says. “So I don’t think there’s going to be more plurality. I think the market has produced a lot of solutions, and we’re going to have consolidation.”
But with that consolidation comes the risk of identity solutions becoming concentrated in companies that maintain control over their products through centralised management. And James Rosewell raises the prospect of handing the keys of digital marketing over to another monopolistic entity.
“I think the industry needs to be very, very wary of swapping one tyrant for another,” he warns. “I would advise the industry to ensure that you have control over the solution, and you’re not putting control into a single company’s hands.”
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