The advertising industry just completed its fourth year of obsessive preparation for Google Chrome’s cookie deprecation—a change that won’t happen until at least 2026, if ever. This week’s news cycle revealed the uncomfortable truth: while everyone built alternative identity solutions, contextual targeting platforms, and first-party data strategies, the fundamental infrastructure remains unchanged. We’ve witnessed the most elaborate theater production in marketing history, and the bill is coming due.
Between November 18-25, 2025, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Major announcements about privacy-focused solutions launched alongside reports showing that third-party cookies still power most digital advertising. The emperor has no clothes, and the industry just keeps tailoring new outfits.
Google’s Cookie Extension Proves Privacy Changes Were Always Negotiable
The underlying absurdity reached peak visibility this week as AdExchanger reported on advertisers continuing to refine their cookie-based strategies well into 2025. Google’s repeated delays—originally slated for 2022, then 2023, then 2024, now 2026—have created a perverse incentive structure. Companies that moved quickly to cookieless solutions now compete against others still extracting maximum value from legacy infrastructure.
The Privacy Sandbox, Google’s heralded alternative, remains largely theoretical for most advertisers. According to industry sources, adoption rates hover below 15% of where they’d need to be if cookies actually disappeared tomorrow. Yet we’ve seen billions in venture capital flow to identity resolution startups, trade desks rebuild entire tech stacks, and conferences dedicate entire tracks to “preparing for a cookieless future.”
The preparation has become the product. The transition has become the business model. And Google holds the timeline hostage to market conditions, regulatory pressure, and competitive dynamics that have nothing to do with user privacy.
Retail Media Networks Double Down on Walled Garden Data While Preaching Openness
This week brought fresh announcements from major retail media networks about “interoperability” and “standardization,” covered extensively by Digiday. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. These same networks have spent the past three years building impenetrable data fortresses, creating proprietary measurement systems, and forcing advertisers into platform-specific workflows.
Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, and Instacart Ads all made noise about collaboration this week. Yet their actual product roadmaps reveal continued investment in closed ecosystems. The “standardization” they discuss means standardizing how advertisers upload creative assets—not opening their first-party data or creating genuine measurement portability.
Retail media networks have become the new cookies: fragmented identifiers that track users across touchpoints, but with even less transparency and transferability. At least with cookies, you could theoretically inspect what data was being collected. With retail media, you get aggregated reporting and trust the black box. The industry traded devil-you-know surveillance for devil-you-don’t commerce data.
Connected TV Fragmentation Reaches Farcical Levels
Adweek highlighted new CTV measurement partnerships this week, each promising to solve the “fragmentation problem.” The irony? Every new measurement solution adds another layer of fragmentation. We now have Nielsen ONE, iSpot, VideoAmp, and a dozen others all claiming to provide unified measurement while using different panels, different methodologies, and producing different results.
The CTV ecosystem has replicated every mistake from digital advertising’s first two decades, just with bigger screens. We have:
- Incompatible identity systems across platforms
- Frequency capping that doesn’t work cross-publisher
- Attribution models that contradict each other
- Ad fraud that’s harder to detect than display
- Viewability standards that vary by vendor
This week’s announcements about “breakthrough” CTV targeting capabilities would be laughable if brands weren’t spending billions on this infrastructure. According to Marketing Brew, CTV ad spend will exceed $30 billion in 2025. Yet advertisers still can’t reliably deduplicate reach across Roku, Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Amazon Fire TV.
The streaming wars created distribution chaos, and the advertising industry’s response has been to build more competitive measurement systems rather than demanding actual interoperability. It’s the privacy theater playbook applied to a new channel: create solutions for problems that wouldn’t exist with genuine cooperation.
AI Agents Promise Personalization While Destroying Context
Multiple publications covered the rise of AI shopping agents this week, with Ad Age exploring how brands are preparing for a world where consumers delegate purchase decisions to AI assistants. The breathless coverage ignored a fundamental tension: these agents work by stripping away the contextual and emotional factors that make advertising effective.
If AI agents comparison-shop based purely on specifications and price, what happens to brand differentiation? If consumers never visit websites or see ads because their agent handles transactions, where does demand creation occur? The industry has spent 100 years understanding that people make irrational, emotionally-driven purchase decisions—and now we’re celebrating technology that removes that irrationality.
The AI agent future looks suspiciously like a return to Yellow Pages advertising: pay to be listed, compete on price, hope your specifications match search queries. Every luxury brand, every challenger brand, every product that succeeds through aspiration rather than specs should be terrified. But this week’s coverage treated it as inevitable progress.
The Real Story: Platform Dependency Intensifies While Independence Rhetoric Increases
Across all this week’s news—from privacy solutions to retail media to CTV to AI agents—one pattern dominates: advertisers have less control and more dependency than ever, despite endless talk of “taking back ownership” of customer relationships. The tools marketed as liberation are actually deeper lock-in.
Every cookieless solution requires partnerships with identity vendors who become new intermediaries. Every retail media network demands budget commitments and data sharing. Every CTV platform requires separate integrations and measurement contracts. Every AI agent becomes another gatekeeper between brands and customers.
The advertising industry has spent half a decade preparing for privacy changes that keep not happening, while the actual shift—toward platform-mediated relationships that eliminate direct brand-customer connections—accelerates unopposed. We’ve been solving the wrong problem, and the platforms love it.
What This Means for 2026
If current trends continue, 2026 will bring more delays, more “solutions” that increase complexity, and more consolidation of power among platforms. The cookie deprecation saga has revealed that transformative change in digital advertising only happens when platforms decide it serves their interests—not because of privacy regulation, user demand, or advertiser pressure.
Smart marketers should stop preparing for the privacy future we’ve been promised and start adapting to the platform-controlled present we actually inhabit. That means building genuinely owned channels (email, SMS, communities), creating products worth seeking out rather than being sold, and accepting that most digital advertising will remain a rental game with increasing rent.
The industry’s privacy theater has been expensive, distracting, and ultimately beside the point. The real question isn’t how we’ll advertise without cookies—it’s whether we’ll have any direct relationship with customers at all once platforms control every touchpoint. That question got more urgent this week, even as everyone kept rehearsing the same old script.
Sources
AdExchanger – Ad Tech News
Digiday – Media and Marketing News
Adweek – Advertising News
Marketing Brew – Marketing Industry News
Ad Age – Advertising Industry News