A LETTER TO GOOGLE: THANK YOU & NOT-THANK YOU AFTER THE CHROME COOKIES EXTENSION

Dear Google,

We just heard you’ve pushed back your deadline for cookie deprecation and we wanted to say “thank you.” Thank you for shining a light into real user privacy concerns in the digital landscape over the past year.

Now, on to the not-thank you portion of our letter. Not-thank you for giving small businesses a threat to use your products; not providing real, trusted, and validated solutions to help businesses grow in a cookie-less environment — further dividing the digital landscape and very obviously trying to profit off of your own user data black box in a post-cookie world. Not-thank you for the hours, days, and months spent by agencies to prepare their clients and their own business for an inevitable and quickly approaching complete overhaul of an industry without industry consensus on how to move forward.

But if we’ve learned nothing over the past year, it’s how to adapt to change, pivot, and make use of the silver lining. And that’s exactly what we are going to do. While the industry will continue to argue and find solutions for a (now-extended-deadline) cookie-less future, we will continue to advocate for building customer relationships and not user data exploitation. We will continue to test new privacy safe tracking and targeting. And we will be ready and supportive of a consumer-first and privacy-first future… whenever that comes.

As our clients already know, we’ve made leaps and bounds in the past year to bring them closer to this new future — helping them build and use their 1st-party data, keeping them updated and educated on the latest industry shifts that impact their business directly, and bringing new and innovative partners, technologies, and strategies to continue to set their business up for success – cookies or not.

— Tori Stowers (she/her), Lewis Media Partners