After four years of preparation, instead of canceling cookies, Google announced that it’s cancelling its deprecation of third party scripts in Chrome which would have prevented them from running without user intervention. This was always a controversial move by the biggest player (by orders of magnitude) in online advertising and tracking. Their replacement solution, called Privacy Sandbox, would have mostly served… you guessed it: Google. Not competitors, and not the entire advertising ecosystem.

Advertisers worldwide were struggling to rush forward with cookie-independent ad targeting. Regulators were scrutinizing Google’s decisions and threatening oversight. On top of this, the timing was never right–both for Google and its customers traditionally dependent on third party scripts for tracking.

What will Google’s decision mean for you? While Chrome will continue to run third-party scripts, it’s critical to remember that lesser-used browsers now block them by default, specifically Firefox and Safari. Increasingly, users on mobile and desktop alike use plugins or other software settings to block tracking. We estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of your site visitors aren’t being tracked. This will increase. So get ready.

For measurement, the future is first-party. This is where your own domain delivers all tracking scripts. Data is captured and stored in your own reporting system that’s, preferably, not provided by a third party. Organizations should own their data in our opinion, and benefit from it. Sure, this means implementing first-party analytics instead of the much easier choice of outsourcing it to you-know-who. But the harder choice prepares your organization for the future, and provides better privacy protections to visitors.

For advertising, the future is uncertain. Cookie-powered programmatic marketing has already declined in efficacy for years. Placement with publishers and networks aligned with your target audience is returning as a strategy, but is overpriced. Our advice: keep building your first-party data for targeting. This has never been more important. Organizations investing the time and budget to do this will see long-term benefits.

Anything a platform does that reduces usage is bad for business. Twitter / X continues a sequence of questionable decisions in their latest moves to make account analytics a “Premium” feature and making “Likes” private.

After its meaningless rebrand to X and 2023’s removal of API services which further cuts off the platform from the rest of the internet, these changes continue to “fix” problems that didn’t exist before. Our opinion: X looks desperate for revenue by putting elementary analytics behind a paywall.

Organizations that have seen their Twitter metrics plummet for years due to poor user quality control (too many bots and far too many trolls) must now pay for the privilege of reading such numbers.

Many non-profits, trade associations, corporations, and political organizations have been questioning their strategy on X: is it still worth the effort? Can we reach an effective audience? Is our social media effort better applied elsewhere? Hiding the analytics and the “Likes”, a key engagement measurement, will undeniably make these strategic questions easier to answer.

In our opinion, AI is becoming a part of daily creative workflow. It’s our job to learn the tools that are transforming the industry. And use them effectively.

What are we using AI for now? Primarily, creative concept ideation. Typically the hardest part of the creative process, AI art tools help provide quick and easy ways to test ideas and concepts in the early stages of design.

For example, if a client asks for an image of a person golfing with their club disintegrating into thin air as he swings, the creative tool Midjourney makes this concept exploration easy to imagine. It can save hours of time (and cost) that would have otherwise been spent scouring stock imagery. It’s certainly not perfect, but results are getting better each day as we learn how to use the tools.

What’s the downside? Sometimes AI-generated art can look generic, or repetitive. It has a certain “AI feel” that people are starting to recognize. It can’t capture the creative inspiration or human touch of a designer. Yet…

What’s the takeaway? AI is a graphic design tool, not a replacement for designers.

Google is deploying changes to its search engine that will de-list content that is auto-generated for the purpose of spamming search results. The updates also penalize domains (including otherwise reputable ones) that host low-quality content intended to influence page rank. This practice, called “site reputation abuse,” happens when established publishers rent out pages to lesser-known organizations that want to expand their search footprint and link authority, capitalizing on the established domain to point to their lower-ranked content. It has provided a revenue stream to sites that offer this service. But perhaps not for much longer.

Google will now call such content what it is: spam. The only way to influence search is the hard way: create original, high-quality, well-optimized sites. Earn inbound links from reputable external sites because your content is worth it, not because you’ve paid for them. Keep your content fresh, mobile-responsive, and fast-loading.

Let’s talk, if you’re in the market for an SEO strategy.

They encourage advertisers to hand over tactical decision making to software. Some of them work as intended, like increasing delivery for higher-performing ads or split testing between different targeting approaches. But others serve the ad platforms far more than the advertiser.

We’ve experimented with all of these features, running A/B tests to see if they actually yield better results compared to old-fashioned human decision making. The tools that “design” your ads for you—just input your text and a pile of graphics, and let the platform decide what works best—frequently output confusing units that miss the mark. (Use with caution!) Tools that attempt to automate targeting or expand it to reach more people lead, most often, to lower CTRs and conversion rates.

Sure, they offer these tools to make their platforms more approachable. But they also reduce cost effectiveness, increase revenue for the platform, and unnecessarily extend optimization phases. Compared with intelligent, insightful human direction of both creative and targeting, these automation features are, in a word, wasteful. At least for now. We’ll keep a watchful eye on them for you and continue to make sure your ad dollars are responsibly spent.