Apple’s new iPhone 8 is out in the wild, but the most significant impact for marketers came months earlier with the unveiling of iOS 11 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
With iOS 11, which will be released to the masses next week, Apple announced it will accelerate its long-held policy of elbowing the cookie into obsolescence.
In essence, the changes brought on by iOS 11 seek to constrain the use of cookies so that they can be used to log in to sites people visit most, but the use of cookies to track users across sites will be limited or eliminated.
The near-term effects are not hard to predict. The software updates to Safari, which accounts for roughly a third of all mobile browser traffic, will skew immediately to the advantage of the predominant ad-based web properties, namely Facebook and Google, which users visit often. That will create a serious disadvantage for the rest of the publishing ecosystem, which still relies heavily on third-party cookies to track and place advertisements.
But the macro trend at work here is impossible to miss: Apple is trying to kill the cookie. And they likely will succeed.
It’s not a question of if, but when.
Comments