I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered.
It's incredibly hard to tell. For us the goal of eliminating Cookies was important given the stance we have on privacy so everything went from there. The folks working in marketing for sure were not happy with the directive as it makes their job much harder.
But the world is still spinning, even without cookies. That's enough to call this a success.
Heh, that's very much like the old "... and nothing of value was lost" then.
- Cookies weren't doing a whole lot for them to begin with, and removing their use had negligible impact.
- The other work their marketing department did to try and compensate for discontinuation of cookie usage interfered with the test, making the results useless for evaluating the value of cookies.
I'm leaning towards the second one based on the response above you.
Laws like ePrivacy in the EU do indeed have specific provisions regarding cookies but e.g. the GDPR is much broader than that and would still apply. How truthful is it that eliminating cookies is motivated by a strong stance on privacy rather than just getting a head start in marketing instead of having to scramble when Google pulls the plug? It doesn't sound like you reduced the tracking and behavioral analysis beyond what was technically unavoidable?
I mean, based on my interactions with marketing people, they often don't really know if much of what they've done has helped the business at all, and the majority of their work (apart from actually creating marketing copy and interacting with customers) seems to revolve around figuring out how to attribute booms in business to their previous campaigns while building plausible deniability for inevitable busts. Don't get me wrong, not ALL of it is completely incomprehensible: email and referrer links are pretty straightforwardly calculable in terms of their impact; but things like "brand awareness" campaigns are nigh impossible to actually gauge the impact of.
