On January 14, 2020, Google announced that they plan to phase out support for the third-party cookie in Chrome over the next two years — and subsequently sent the digital marketing industry into a tailspin.

Since then, our industry has systematically gone through the Five Stages of Grief; it started with denial, moved to anger, then there was bargaining, many were depressed and now, finally, we’ve moved to acceptance. While we’ve begun to accept our cookie-less, third-party future, what that future looks like is still undefined.  

This blog series is meant to be an ongoing narrative that distills the complex conversations happening in our space into digestible takeaways. Here are three things to know now:

1. Safari’s ITP Can’t Be Ignored

Safari handles approximately 16% of the world’s internet traffic and about 47% of North...

Entering 2020, marketers will discover a changing digital world governed by a new set of laws — most notably from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect on January 1 and is the first large-scale U.S. law protecting consumers’ digital data. Known to some as “GDPR Light,” CCPA poses new challenges to for-profit businesses working in California.

So what’s next on the horizon for digital privacy? And what do marketers need to be prepared for?

In my opinion, the greatest threat to today’s digital marketing space is privacy legislation. I’m not saying that it isn’t needed — it most definitely is — but how it is enacted is going to be critical to our industry surviving.

The internet has broken down civic borders and made our world a much more global community, but our laws...