The landscape of Adtech looks nothing like anyone predicted just two years ago. Google reversed course on killing third-party cookies. Privacy Sandbox is officially dead as of October 2025. The “cookieless apocalypse” millions were preparing for? Pretty much cancelled. And first-party data got more valuable.
What we’re left with is an AdTech industry caught somewhere between déjà vu and a plot twist. Cookies didn’t disappear, but their meaning changed. Advertisers suddenly had to rethink everything they built “for the post-cookie era,” while publishers realised their most powerful asset was sitting in front of them the whole time. And with 2026 around the corner, the question is how the entire ecosystem adjusts its relationship with privacy, identity and the data it can actually trust.
What Happened?
Remember when the entire AdTech industry was bracing for third-party cookie extinction? Then Google threw everyone a curveball. In April 2025, Google announced it wouldn’t roll out a standalone consent prompt for third-party cookies and would keep Chrome’s existing cookie controls as they are for now. Then came October: Google retired most of the Privacy Sandbox technologies and scaled down the initiative. Only a handful of tools survived.
So where does that leave us?
Privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA still tighten the screws on data collection. For example, French regulator CNIL hit Google (€325 million) and Shein (€150 million) with large cookie-related fines for placing tracking technologies without valid consen, marking some of the largest cookie-related penalties ever issued. Browsers like Safari continue blocking third-party cookies by default. Users increasingly reject tracking. Advertisers grow skeptical about cookie-based data quality.
What’s changing is cookie value, how much risk is attached to it, and that makes first-party data strategies essential whether cookies exist or not.
Why First-Party Data Became the Real Gold Standard
First-party data is information you collect directly from your users. Their behaviour on your site, newsletter signups, account registrations, declared interests, purchase history, subscriptions, loyalty programmes. Everything users willingly share with you, not anybody else. And publishers have woken up to what they are sitting on. INMA’s 2025 Advertising Initiative reports that 86% of publishers now see first-party data as their most important asset for driving ad revenue, and Also, in Q1 2025, 71% of publishers recognized first-party data as critical for positive advertising outcomes, which is up from 64% in 2024. And 85% think its role in monetization will increase in 2026.
First-party data is information you collect directly from your users. Their behaviour on your site, newsletter signups, account registrations, declared interests, purchase history, subscriptions, loyalty programmes. Everything users willingly share with you, not anybody else. And publishers have woken up to what they are sitting on. INMA’s 2025 Advertising Initiative reports that 86% of publishers now see first-party data as their most important asset for driving ad revenue, and Also, in Q1 2025, 71% of publishers recognized first-party data as critical for positive advertising outcomes, which is up from 64% in 2024. And 85% think its role in monetization will increase in 2026.
Why The Shift?
You own it. Complete control over collection, consent and usage. No middleman and wondering if that third-party vendor is GDPR-compliant.
It’s high quality. When someone registers, logs in or subscribes, you are getting reliable signals about real people, not probabilistic guesses across fragmented touchpoints.
Users don’t hate it by default. Research shows 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands offering personalized experiences. When personalisation is clearly tied to value (think better recommendations, fewer irrelevant messages), people are more forgiving about data collection.
It’s resilient. While you still need to stay compliant with evolving regulations, your direct relationship with your audience remains your most stable asset, no matter what browsers or platforms do next.
Where To Collect First-Party Data?
If you look closely, almost every digital product already has windows into first-party data, they just weren’t treated like gold until time forced us to rethink the foundations. The most obvious ones sit inside the places you already own: your login wall, subscription flows, onboarding, loyalty programs and the good old newsletter signup that somehow always survives every AdTech cycle.
News publishers have a natural advantage here: readers register, subscribe, attend events, sign up for newsletters and tell you which topics they care about. INMA calls this combination of zero-party, behavioural, demographic and contextual data the single biggest revenue optimisation opportunity in today’s media advertising.
The pattern is simple all around – from logged-in news, media products, apps and loyalty ecosystems to newsletters, direct messaging and on-platform engagement – ask for data where you can actually give something meaningful back (better content, smoother checkout, real benefits), and treat that as the centre of your advertising stack.
What about AI AdTech and where does it actually fit now?
Artificial intelligence stopped being a buzzword in adtech sometime around mid-2024. According to industry data from 2025, 72% of businesses were already using AI in their marketing strategies by 2023, and that adoption has only accelerated.
By 2026 over 85% of global ad spend is projected to be influenced by AI tools. The value of this influence is clear: 92% of marketers, according to Smartly, agree AI is transforming customer engagement.
So, the power of AI lies in two critical areas:
Hyper-personalization: AI analyzes deep data points like browsing behavior, purchase history, context, and even temporal patterns to produce messages and offers so tailored they feel predictive. This moves beyond simple audience segments to dynamically customised ads across search, social and streaming services.
Creative scalability: generative AI has moved from a basic copy helper to an engine that can produce hundreds of ad variations from a single brief. It can instantly tailor tone and format to different audience segments. In 2026, AI may achieve over 90% accuracy in forecasting which creative assets will perform best. Traditional testing methods are so behind in this statistics. Speed plus relevance can allow our fellow human beings to focus on the big idea while the AI handles the high-volume execution.
What to Wait from 2026: Key Trends
Looks like many look towards a marketing ecosystem that is centered on precision, prediction and workflow integration. 2026 might have foundational trends (or everything will just change overnight):
Predictive intelligence. Are we moving from reactive reporting to proactive prediction? Looks like that. Instead of launching campaigns and waiting to see what works, marketers are integrating AI-powered models to forecast performance, validate message fit and predict consumer intent beforecommitting media spend. This predictive intelligence is designed to reduce media waste and ensure that budgets are spent only to the best of the best creatives.
Cross-channel fluency. The customer journey is a fluid movement across channels, not a linear funnel at all. Leading “precision-first” marketers are integrating AI across their entire workflow and advertising everywhere. Literally everywhere. It can be six or more platforms including social, video and CTV. This cross-channel orchestration is a way to deliver a seamless, personalised experience.
The efficiency. In an environment of tightening budgets and increased complexity, efficiency has become a critical performance metric (was it ever not that critical though?). The move to predictive systems is driven by the mandate to cut media waste from non-performing impressions and inefficient targeting. Precision-first marketers are 27% more likely to keep their media waste under 10%. We better spend smarter, right?
The Enduring Value of Authenticity: Closing Thought
So, the AdTech story of 2026. We are left with a foundation built on owned relationships (first-party data) and scaled by AI. But good advertising won’t be defined by who has the most data or the most automated workflows. It will be defined by who can use these tools to communicate in a way that feels honest, meaningful and genuinely useful to the person on the other side of the screen. AI can personalise, optimise and predict, but it can’t replace the instinct for what makes a message feel true. That responsibility still sits with the people behind the campaigns.
That is the actual gold standard that will define success.
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