This Week in Advertising: Cry Hard, Adapt Fast, and Stop Worshipping Dead Cookies

Welcome to This Week in Advertising and Marketing, Where the Industry is in Its ‘Doomsday Cult’ Era

Author

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
February 07, 2025

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Table of Contents

Is lead generation broken, or are we just doing it wrong? Bill Rice—Air Force counterintelligence officer turned fintech pioneer turned sales strategist—joins The ADOTAT Show to bust myths, from the illusion of “new leads” to why PPC is just duct tape for marketing.

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The ad world is running in circles, flailing like a cat that just realized it’s been staring at its own tail for an hour.
The week's highlights? A funeral for third-party cookies, a regulatory cage match brewing in Washington, and yet another round of Omnicom flexing its merger muscles like it’s auditioning for the next Fast & Furious sequel.

Buckle up—oh wait, scratch that—you hate “buckle up.”
So instead, grab your overpriced oat-milk latte and let’s dive into the madness.

🍪 Cookies Are Dead. Stop Crying and Start Adapting.

Seriously, the eulogy is over. Move on.

The digital ad industry is still mourning third-party cookies like a hoarder who just found out their 10-year Costco membership expired. Meanwhile, Google is finally doing what it swore it would do five years ago: torching third-party cookies in Chrome.

For the past decade, advertisers have been using cookies like a nosy neighbor with binoculars, tracking every move a user makes. But now? That party is over. Apple’s been blocking cookies for years, regulators are breathing down the industry’s neck, and users are increasingly behaving like that one uncle who refuses to browse the internet without incognito mode.

The industry’s response? Full-on, blind panic.

💀 “But how will we target users?”
💀 “How will we track conversions?”
💀 “How will we justify our six-figure programmatic budgets to the CMO?”

The answer, dear marketers, is Alternative IDs—the Frankenstein’s monster of ad tech. These are essentially third-party cookies in witness protection: rebranded, repackaged, and pretending they’ve turned over a new leaf.

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Here’s the deal:

🥇 Deterministic IDs: The Exclusive Country Club of Tracking

Think of these as TSA PreCheck for advertisers—users voluntarily provide their emails, phone numbers, or logins, and advertisers follow them around the internet legally.

✔️ More accurate than your mom’s intuition—these IDs know it’s you.
✔️ Privacy-compliant (for now)—because users “agreed” (aka clicked without reading).
✔️ Great for cross-device tracking—log in once, and the ID follows you like an overenthusiastic puppy.

🚫 Problem? Scale.
Most people don’t log into every site, so deterministic IDs work great… until they don’t.

Who’s using them? Unified ID 2.0, LiveRamp’s RampID, Criteo’s First-Party Data Network.

🎭 Probabilistic IDs: The Ad Industry’s Best Guess

If deterministic IDs are VIP club access, then probabilistic IDs are the guy at the door trying to guess who you are based on vibes alone.

These track users without logins by piecing together digital breadcrumbs—IP addresses, devices, and screen resolutions—creating an educated guess of who you are.

✔️ Massive scale—works across many users.
✔️ Cross-device tracking magic—your phone, tablet, and laptop all get connected into one creepy little profile.

🚫 Problem? Accuracy and legality.
It’s like one of those conspiracy boards covered in red string—sometimes they get it right, sometimes they think your grandma is a 23-year-old sneakerhead.
Also, Apple and Google hate fingerprinting so much they’d rather set their servers on fire than allow it.

So, are Alternative IDs the savior of advertising?
Not quite. They’re more like the duct-taped workaround the industry is clinging to while pretending nothing is wrong.

💰 Omnicom’s Merger Madness: When Two Giants Become One Mega-Giant

Omnicom is still in its “BUY EVERYTHING” phase

💸 The plan? Spend $750 million in cost savings (read: layoffs).
📈 The goal? Create a Godzilla-sized ad giant that dominates data-driven media.
🤖 The buzzword? AI.

CEO John Wren is basically promising that AI and first-party data from IPG’s Acxiom will transform Omnicom into an ad-tech juggernaut.
Translation: More automation, fewer humans, and a lot of investors clinking champagne glasses.

🚨 Who gets axed?
Wren swears it’s only “back-office” employees (legal, HR, accounting) who should be worried.
But let’s be real—if your job involves spreadsheets and meetings that could have been emails, you might want to start updating that LinkedIn profile.

The regulatory process is underway, with March 18 as the big shareholder vote. Expect more Wall Street happy dances and a few more agencies crying into their expense reports.

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