The advertising industry has been preparing for a cookieless world for five years. Google has delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome multiple times, creating a perpetual planning mode where the transition always feels imminent but never quite arrives. Meanwhile, retail media has been operating in a cookieless world the entire time — and doing very well.
Why Retail Media Never Needed Cookies
Retail media’s data infrastructure is built on authenticated user sessions, not cookie tracking. When a consumer logs into Amazon, Walmart, Tesco, or any other retail platform, their identity is known directly — through account credentials, not inference. Their purchase history, browsing behaviour, and loyalty programme activity are all linked to a persistent, consented identity that doesn’t depend on third-party tracking infrastructure. This is a fundamentally more robust data model: more accurate (actual identity rather than probabilistic matching), more durable (immune to browser changes), and more defensible from a regulatory perspective.
What Cookie Deprecation Does to the Rest of Digital Advertising
When Google eventually removes third-party cookies from Chrome — affecting approximately 65% of global browser traffic — it will degrade targeting precision and attribution quality across display advertising, programmatic buying, and retargeting campaigns. For retail media, cookie deprecation is not a risk — it’s a competitive advantage. As the quality of cookie-based targeting declines, the comparative value of first-party purchase data increases. The most sophisticated retail media platforms are already building “clean room” infrastructure — privacy-safe environments where brand first-party data and retailer first-party data can be matched and activated without either party exposing their underlying data.
Brands Without First-Party Data Are Exposed
The structural vulnerability for brands is the combination of cookie deprecation, IDFA signal loss, and an increasingly fragmented identity landscape. Brands that don’t have their own first-party data assets — CRM databases, loyalty programmes, direct digital relationships — will become increasingly dependent on retail media platforms as the primary source of audience quality. That dependency needs to be managed: invest in first-party data infrastructure of your own, use it in combination with retailer data through clean rooms, and treat retail media not as a crutch but as a premium channel with genuine strategic value.