Internet Cookies: Your Frenemy?
According to a study by all aboutcookies.org, less than half of the people surveyed know what a cookie actually is. They get that cookies are tracking their behavior on websites and used to personalize ads and 38% say that they will accept all cookies blindly. Some argue ignorance is bliss and some in the industry would like it to stay that way.
I disagree. It is precisely this lack of understanding that leads to fear about what advertisers know about you and a desire to become anonymous online. It has allowed Apple to stake a claim on privacy through ads like this which suggest you are literally being followed around. Before making a decision about what information you do and don’t want advertisers to know about you, understand what it is that they actually do know.
The cookie was not created for advertising. The cookie was developed in the very early days of the worldwide web; as adoption was growing it became clear that in order for the web to fulfill its promise of making the world’s information available to all people at any time, it needed to have a memory. Pre-cookie, your experience online was challenging and frustrating. Every time you logged onto a site, you were a new person. The content you received was the exact same whether you visited a site once or returned to it time and again. You couldn’t return to a task that you were completing and had left undone, you would have to start all over again. If it were a site that you had done business with, you needed to constantly re-enter your information. Whether you visited a site consistently for sports information or recipes, it didn’t matter everyone saw the same thing and you would have to navigate through the site to get what you wanted.
A Netscape engineer (one of the first web browsers), Lou Montulli had the idea to drop a small piece of code on the browser so when you returned it knew who you were and what activity had taken place on that browser previously. Here is where it gets tricky, when we say “knew who you were,” it doesn’t actually know you, not in the traditional sense at least. It knows your device. It knows that someone using a web browser on a specific device with a certain screen size and resolution in a certain geography (based on the IP address location) at a certain time using a certain browser type had visited various websites and had read articles, watched videos, ordered a product and yes, clicked on an ad.
For most of the first decade of the worldwide web advertisers mostly ignored cookies. Digital advertising was placed much like traditional advertising was. Advertisers worked with publishers to understand who their audiences were broadly looking at age, gender and interests. They would place ads on sites that they thought mostly reached their demographic within content that would appeal to their prospective buyers. I was working on packaged goods accounts at the time so I was mostly looking to reach moms to buy food products. I would advertise on sites that I thought moms read and place my ads near the recipe sections. The digital ads ran along with likely a print and/or television campaign and as long as sales increased, we considered it a success.
But around the turn of the century, we realized that with so many website choices, it was impossible to analyze them all and we needed a better way to measure the results of our digital campaigns. That’s when it dawned on us that we could track whether or not some saw our ad, clicked on our ad and even whether or not they went on to buy our product. That is when we really leaned into cookies to monitor our online campaigns.
We started tapping into that information. Rather than simply reaching pet owners by placing ads in television shows whose viewers tended to own pets; a large percentage of pet owners have children so we could reach them in family friendly sitcoms, for example, I could tell from the cookies if that browser had been searching for pet food. Even better, I could tell if the were looking for dog food, cat food, even bird food. So now I could make sure that dog owners saw ads for dog food and cat owners saw ads for cat food.
Future posts will address the nuances of what information is collected and how it is stored analyzed and aggregated for advertising targeted purposes.
In the meantime, next time the “Accept All Cookies” message pops up, I encourage you to take a few times to “Manage My Settings” and learn about the different types of information the website is asking to collect and why.