Home AdExchanger Talks Innovation Is The Only Rational Response To The End Of Third-Party Cookies

Innovation Is The Only Rational Response To The End Of Third-Party Cookies

SHARE:
Wendi Dunlap, EVP, business intelligence & audience science, Mediahub

Mediahub Worldwide’s Wendi Dunlap is done with hearing about the cookie-pocalypse.

The end of third-party cookies (in the slowest demise ever) isn’t “Armageddon for marketers,” says Dunlap, EVP of business intelligence and audience science at the IPG-owned agency.

“This is just another phase of marketing,” Dunlap says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “Smart marketers are still going to be able to drive results in the face of cookie deprecation.”

Without third-party cookies as a crutch, advertisers will have to get creative by testing new options, like alternative identity solutions, and by embracing oldies but goodies, like contextual targeting.

External forces, whether in the form of regulations or platform privacy changes, can be an opportunity to innovate, Dunlap says, and “recenter on the human, the person, the consumer – and not just their footprint.”

The two most important things that brands can do now are test everything and not freak out.

“It’s important that marketers don’t panic and really think strategically about who they want to test,” Dunlap says. “This is a really exciting time for exploration.”

Also in this episode: The trend toward outcome-based planning and measurement, what it means to be a “conscious” marketer,” adopting data ethics, dealing with signal loss and Wendi’s favorite sci-fi novels.

For more articles featuring Wendi Dunlap, click here.

Must Read

For Super Bowl First-Timers Manscaped And Ro, Performance Means Changing Perception

For Manscaped and Ro, the Big Game is about more than just flash and exposure. It’s about shifting how audiences perceive their brands.

Alphabet Can Outgrow Everything Else, But Can It Outgrow Ads?

Describing Google’s revenue growth has become a problem, it so vastly outpaces the human capacity to understand large numbers and percentage growth rates. The company earned more than $113 billion in Q4 2025, and more than $400 billion in the past year.

BBC Studios Benchmarks Its Podcasts To See How They Really Stack Up

Triton Digital’s new tool lets publishers see how their audience size compares to other podcasts at the show and episode level.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Traffic Jam

People Inc. Says Who Needs Google?

People Inc. is offsetting a 50% decline in Google search traffic through off-platform growth and its highest digital revenue gains in five quarters.

The MRC Wants Ad Tech To Get Honest About How Auctions Really Work

The MRC’s auction transparency standards aren’t intended to force every programmatic platform to use the same auction playbook – but platforms do have to adopt some controversial OpenRTB specs to get certified.

A TV remote framed by dollar bills and loose change

Resellers Crackdowns Are A Good Thing, Right? Well, Maybe Not For Indie CTV Publishers

SSPs have mostly either applauded or downplayed the recent crackdown on CTV resellers, but smaller publishers see it as another revenue squeeze.