Marketing in a cookieless world: Building a resilient, data-driven strategy

By the end of 2025, global digital activity across search, social media, video streaming, email, gaming and more is projected to generate an estimated 181 zettabytes of data, according to Exploding Topics, a Silicon Valley research firm. (To help you wrap your mind around that, a single zettabyte translates to 1 trillion gigabytes — or the equivalent to the solid-state storage capacity of 1.9 billion laptop computers.)

It’s no wonder a lot of marketers feel like they’re drowning in data.

But new approaches to data-informed marketing, along with changes to the ecosystem brought on by developments such as the end of the third-party cookie, are creating the potential for a seismic shift in our craft. That shift promises to enhance our abilities to find the data we’re missing — the most relevant, actionable data needed for connecting with customers.

Here, a brief guide to the evolving data landscape — and a look at how marketers can engage consumers with unprecedented precision while moving the needle for their brands and campaigns.

You’ve been hearing about it forever: The end of the line for the third-party cookie. But the changes shaping the future of data-driven marketing go deeper than those little bits of computer code that nobody ever really liked. In addition to cookies, using email addresses to identify customers and their behaviors is also at risk, as providers develop systems that block tracking pixels in emails and hide locations and IP addresses.

And consumers have been busy figuring out that they also have agency in protecting their privacy. According to eMarketer, more than a third (35%) of computer users in North America use antivirus software; another 20% use an ad blocker while browsing the internet. Use of privacy-preserving browsers and search engines now stands at 13%.

The steady erosion of the effectiveness of these data-acquisition channels is helping reinforce just how imperfect they really are. For when data increasingly can’t be connected and contextualized across the omnichannel spectrum, marketers are working in the dark.

It’s a recipe for imprecise audience targeting (i.e., addressability), ineffective consumer engagement and challenges to ad measurement and frequency verification — resulting in less-effective targeting, weaker engagement and diminished campaign ROI.

But, as this era closes, another is opening.

This will be a profound shift. The most obvious truth in this era is that standing still is not an option — cookies are going away and consumer interest in greater control and privacy is here to stay. So, what are the options?

The most talked-about alternative, of course, is enabling brands to collect their own first-party data (or, zero-party) via their own websites and apps. This approach seems promising, but it also holds risks, as not every brand has a legitimate reason to be asking for personal information.

Others are talking about building on existing IDs (e.g., see The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s RampID), while Meta is promoting the use of conversions APIs. Then there are contextual targeting, data partnerships and clean rooms, Google’s Privacy Sandbox APIs — there’s a lot to contemplate. The key is to understand that each set of options and toolsets has advantages and disadvantages.

The shift in the balance of power and influence in marketing from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley has produced monumental digital successes over the past two decades. But as consumers reassert control over the use of their data and lawmakers oblige them with tough new privacy protections, and as channels continue to fragment, one new attribute is emerging as a differentiator: resilience.

Marketers need to stop wasting time and money on chasing the ghosts of cookie-based data or email attribution. They need sources of data that can resist preemption, providing reliable insights through disruptions caused by regulation and other vicissitudes of digital technology.

Data resiliency has traditionally been thought of in the context of catastrophe: losing data or control of data through a natural disaster or malicious hacking attack such as ransomware. Moving forward, marketers will gravitate toward data sources that embrace a broader definition of resiliency, enduring other types of unexpected changes — in policy, technology, consumer preference and regulation.

Succeeding through this transformation is more about quality and transparency than it is about quantity. The marketing world continues to obsess about first-party data, which involves developing website and app features that induce customers to share information, directly or indirectly, providing insights into their preferences and behaviors.

Nearly half (49%) of brands believe that activating is their best option, according to a 2023 DoubleVerify survey. At the same time, though, consumers are increasingly protective of their information — a 2024 survey from consumer research firm Attest found that more than eight in 10 are concerned about the sharing of data with brands online.

The list is long. Partly because people have multiple email addresses and carry multiple devices, the challenge of linking those data points to an individual is herculean, and often involves some fancy mathematical guesswork.

But what if you could anchor your strategy to something more familiar and tangible?

Quad believes we have moved into a phase of marketing that will establish the household as the centerpiece for collecting, analyzing, interpreting and acting on information about existing and future customers. Home addresses remain one of the few enduring identifiers in a fragmented digital ecosystem.

“You only have one place you call home — and home gives you a real insight into people,” Lowcock says. “Your address tells you about people and their passions. It tells you what matters in the community. If you tell me where someone lives, I can tell you a lot about them.”

Most days we come back from our analog-world mailbox with a mixture of catalogs, direct mail marketing letters or postcards, circulars, magazines, bills and — if we are lucky — a letter from a friend or family member.

In that mail mix we see a valuable opportunity to bring together validated information from the offline world and integrate it with corresponding online data sources. For example, someone who subscribes to Runner’s World and Trail Runner magazines for home delivery shows where their passions lie. This “passion” can also be thought of as a form of offline contextual advertising.

This offline-to-online link provides an opportunity to break down silos and build more enduring sources of customer marketing data to create more effective campaigns.

Focusing on the home makes sense from a statistical perspective: The average consumer spends more than 7½ hours per day consuming media; that figure climbs to greater than 11 hours when factoring in traditional media and multitasking, according to

At the same time, research also shows that most in-store purchases take place within a 20-minute radius of your house, per Access Development. Making the household the center of your data world only makes sense.

In the cookie- and email-centric world of digital marketing, brands have always been susceptible to the whims of others, whether platforms such as Google or Facebook, technology providers such as Apple or regulators at the state, federal or international level.

A household-centered data strategy changes the rules and puts marketers, for the most part, back in control of their own destinies. It leans on verified or verifiable sources from materials that households are already receiving in the mail, building around already known audiences.

With a household data marketing strategy, the information comes to the marketer ready to be integrated with other verifiable data from digital sources and activated across channels, potentially incorporating CRM data, website visitor data, platform behavior, regional demographic data and more.

What this creates is the possibility for more seamless omnichannel campaigns that start with a mailing address but can extend much farther, to include social media, online display, connected TV, digital out-of-home and other emerging technologies.

Working with a more targeted, reliable and accurate data profile opens the door to greater creativity across the marketing ecosystem with increased effectiveness. Already we’re seeing the signs of how a household-centric data approach can make an impact.

Long-time partner SiriusXM approached Quad about a new campaign that would be rooted in direct mail but incorporate other methods for engaging with prospective customers. One specific element involved exploring whether adding personalized Flowcodes to the outside of a mail package would increase response rates.

Quad’s data and analytics, direct mail and creative teams worked together to produce a turnkey multichannel direct marketing campaign featuring direct mail, targeted social and digital ads, together with data from USPS Informed Delivery and status updates about incoming and outbound packages. The targeted social and digital touches were orchestrated around the mail in-home dates.

Quad also provided measurement, which included an A/B test of direct mail envelopes with personalized Flowcodes against those without them. That experiment alone lifted the scan rate by 30% versus packages with the codes only on materials inside the envelopes.

The benefits to a unified, household-centric approach are reflected downstream. It provides for improved customer service, streamlined sales and marketing, more precise insights into customer behavior and smarter campaigns and measurement.