At its annual I/O Developer Conference in May 2019, Google announced the beginning of its crackdown on third-party cookies to enhance Internet users' privacy - and not coincidentally give itself a new competitive advantage.

In a new post at ThinkwithGoogle.com Google offers a story from Discover Financial Services SVP Andrew Hopkins about how his company is customizing marketing and measurement without the use of cookies.

How Discover Financial Services went about this:

• Consolidated all first-party data on current and potential customers into a cross-channel "central data management platform" (DMP).
• Worked with Google and other partners to set up APIs that deliver real-time data back to their marketing platforms for continuous campaign optimization.
• "Extended timeframes and brought in additional data" to remove "recency bias" (i.e. favoring channels that produced fast conversions).
• Got agreement company-wide on sitewide tagging and data-collection practices. (Apparently this was not easy.)

I don't know what level of investment would be required for a company to set up APIs with "Google and other partners" but I have to think it must be prohibitive for a non-enterprise-level company.

If Google is going to block our cookies, let's hope they will soon offer a "SMB" version of an API to replace the cookie functionality - so we can track prospects down our marketing funnels, learn their preferences and make them relevant offers - while preserving privacy of their personal data.