When the Mayan Apocalypse failed to materialize, the doomsday set needed a new date to mark on their millenarian calendars. For those in the advertising industry, the new doomsday date seems to be sometime in June. That’s when cookies go away and the world as we know it will come to an end – with all the attendant weeping and gnashing of teeth.

As this apocalyptic future fast approaches, many are weighing in on what this change will mean, how it will impact the industry and whether there is any hope. Susan Kuchinskas (@susankuchinskas) of ClickZ explored the issue in her article Should Marketers Fear the Cookie Apocalypse?

The article recounts a panel discussion held at this week at AdExchanger’s sold-out Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco that included executives from AppNexus and Nexage. Brian O’Kelley of AppNexus fears the loss of cookies will mean the end of retargeting. At the other end of the spectrum Victor Milligan of Nexage pointed out that it’s the ability to track users across Web properties that enables the idea of premium advertising. His question is whether the industry will create or coalesce around a new standard to replace the cookie.

Both are half right. Yes, the industry needs a new standard but the good news is that the standard is here now and is being used and adopted across the digital ecosystem.

In these supposed end times, AdTruth’s universal device recognition technology is here to stay and has emerged as the leading approach for the entire digital media ecosystem. Exchanges, DMPs, SSPs, agencies and more – represented by such industry leaders as OpenX, BlueKai, Inneractive, and SOMO to name a few – have deployed our device recognition technology built on over nine years of research and development. At this point, AdTruth is supporting hundreds of billions of impression every month and has anonymously recognized more than 500M devices while respecting consumer privacy and choice.

What has made AdTruth the choice of so many to augment, and in some cases replace the cookie?

• Universality – Ability to recognize any connected device in both desktop and mobile, web and app, supporting common use cases such as retargeting, download tracking, performance monitoring and more.
• Performance – Universal identification that scales and operates with the accuracy and speed advertisers demand including in the RTB environment.
• Privacy-by-Design– The architecture of AdTruth technology is built with privacy in mind from the ground up.
  • It’s a statistic that can associate with high accuracy – but not 100 percent – an anonymous user with a device.
  • It naturally changes over time. As attributes of the device change, so does the identifier associated with it.
  • On premise deployment. AdTruth is deployed within a client’s technical environment. With AdTruth no data leaves the client environment, there is no 3^rd party call, and nothing remains on a consumer’s device. As a result, data protection is guaranteed.

Will the end of cookies be the end of the world? No, far from it. It will be the end of a increasingly ineffective model for identifying and reaching customers. As time moves on so does technology. It is important for the digital ecosystem to realize there are new, better and safer technologies out there waiting to help save the day!