The Cookie Jar Is Empty: How AI in Marketing Replaces Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are on their way out. GDPR and CPRA upended data rights. Apple's App Tracking Transparency demanded user consent. Major browsers like Chrome and Safari announced they'd stop supporting third-party cookies. The demise of cookies is potentially catastrophic. According to McKinsey, some publishers depend on third-party targeted ads for more than 80% of their revenue. When that capability disappears, so too does their income. So how should businesses plan for a cookieless world? Well, it doesn't mean abandoning personalization. Consumers still expect a customized and tailored experience. And in the absence of third-party cookies, artificial intelligence (AI) provides a means to deliver them. Here's a glimpse into how AI can power the future of personalization.

Talk to your customers

"Most brands view data as something to be taken and exploited." That's our own Christian Ward, EVP and Chief Data Officer at Yext. He suggests that this "take and exploit" mentality needlessly constrains organizations, especially when the main way to take (cookies) disappears. Instead of "blasting their monologue with content, pop-ups, and a thousand drop-down menus," Ward says businesses should lean into how humans want to engage: conversation. They'll happily offer information if there's a value exchange. Conversational AI — like chatbots — allows consumers to interact with businesses via dialogue. It's a give and take — or, in other words, a value exchange. And people tell chatbots a lot. They reveal their intentions, ask for advice, request comparisons, and pose objections. Businesses can use that zero-party data (that's data freely offered by consumers) to personalize each consumer's experience, accelerating their path to purchase.

Embrace zero-party data

Conversational transcripts represent one way to collect zero-party data, but there are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other sources. Your website search bar, for instance, essentially asks users, "What can we help you with?" Their answers — waterproof paint, houseplants for low light, keto-friendly recipes — grant you amazing insights into who your users are and what they want. So too does survey data, product feedback, and ad hoc suggestions. Even your users' notification settings add nuance to their wants, needs, and challenges. All of this data is prime fuel for personalization. Zero-party data allows businesses to shortcut inference, deduction, and assumption (read: guesswork). Instead, you can take the information your users have voluntarily offered you and feed it into a personalization engine.

Personalize to individualize as you go

Past personalization was a blunt instrument: segment users and serve them different content. The problem is, people are individuals, not segments. Clicking the same ad doesn't mean two people have the same wants or needs. And those wants and needs change constantly. (How often have you gone to Amazon for one thing and ended up purchasing something else? Where segment-based personalization fails, AI-powered session-aware recommenders thrive, leading to individualized experiences. This approach analyzes a user's behavior — their search habits, browsing choices, cart adds, comparisons, content consumption, whatever — and uses AI to tailor their experience in real-time. Imagine you searched for a tennis racket on a sporting goods website. A session-aware recommender adjusts the website to your interests — recommending particular racket brands and serving blog posts on selecting your ideal racket. Suddenly, you're exploring a website that's tailored to your interests. As your behaviors change (you search for skiing goggles or compare golf clubs or try to contact customer service), so too does the personalization. Instead of making one assumption and segmenting users into a personalization cohort, session-aware recommenders are real-time and reactive.

Cookies are dead, but personalization lives on

Cookies won't disappear overnight. We've already seen a few stays of execution from Google and others, pushing back the cookie apocalypse by a year or two at a time. But marketing leaders aren't hanging around. They're moving fast and early, devising new ways to personalize experiences — and AI is playing a central role. They're deploying chatbots to greet, guide, and advise customers all via natural dialogue. They're building trust with their users and doubling down on zero-party data. And they're turning static personalization into an always-adapting experience tailored to each consumer.