Google Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Forcing Industry To Adapt (mediapost.com)

Catalogs are a tried-and-true instrument in a marketer’s toolbox delivering an in-depth product experience right to any home or office door. With the rise of the digital age, many thought that e-commerce would supplant catalogs, but the opposite has been true. Catalogs continue to hold their own as a marketing channel operating steadily alongside its digital brethren. Catalogs originated as a method to communicate product availability and highlight new goods. Now a company’s website functions in the same capacity and in real-time. Catalogs of today have evolved to serve as a means of inspiration, allowing consumers to visualize products in real-life situations with thoughtful detail and narratives. They also allow brands more room to tell their story and gain consumer trust. This can occur because, unlike the more frenzied pace of online shopping, catalog readers spend between 15 minutes to 30 minutes turning the pages and catalogs are retained for several weeks as a reminder to place an order, shop online, or visit a store. The staying power of catalogs owes itself in part to online shopping, as the two have formed a symbiotic relationship. A printed catalog allows companies to bridge the physical and digital marketing space that can still be targeted and measured.

Siding against Google, a federal appellate court on Tuesday revived a privacy lawsuit brought by Chrome users who said the company wrongly gathered information about their web-browsing activity. In a unanimous 23-page decision, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers's determination that the plaintiffs consented to Google's alleged practices, which she said were disclosed in various privacy policies. The appellate panel ruled that questions regarding Chrome users' consent to data collection require further analysis, and sent the case back to Rogers for additional proceedings.

The U.S. advertising marketplace contracted 12.7% in July versus the same month a year ago, marking its first double-digit rate of decline since July 2020, according to a MediaPost analysis of data from Standard Media Index's U.S. Ad Market Tracker. Compared with July 2020, which was the tail-end of the COVID-19 ad recession, the U.S. ad market was up 29.7%. Smaller ad categories continue to be sustaining ad spending better than the largest ones. While the top 10 ad categories declined 14% in year-over-year ad spending in July, all other categories contracted only 11%.