Cookie Popup

Overview

Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored on your device by your web browser. Tracking cookies compile long-term records of your movements around the Internet. This data is used to make assumptions about your demographic profile and, subsequently, your tastes, values, and preferences. It is a form of surveillance that marketing and advertising professionals understand to be necessary for delivering “relevant” or meaningful ads.   

Cookies are part of a much longer shift in how marketing professionals think about their relationship to customers. In the early 1980s, marketing professionals began to argue that merchandisers could no longer focus on the commercial transaction alone as the primary site of value creation for a company. Organized under the banner of “relationship marketing,” these critics argued that the long popular “exchange paradigm” in marketing was an insufficient model for capturing value in an increasingly information- and service-oriented economy.⁴

Rather, what mattered most happened “after the sale is over.”⁵  

These critics pushed marketing managers to turn away from individual exchanges and focus instead on nurturing the broader ‘relations’ that structured the long duration connection between a client and company. They warned that the survival of a firm would increasingly depend upon the marketer’s careful cultivation of data from each moment of contact with a customer. This data could be used to strengthen the relationship by producing detailed probabilistic profiles that might predict how a particular kind of customer’s wants and needs would evolve over time.⁶

In a digital media context, cookies allow for us to track users in real time. Cookies also play an important part in the broader marketing strategy that many platforms use to convince us to make accounts: customization.

Customization promises a web that is just for you. The hope, although largely unsubstantiated even by market research, is that these forms of customization will lead to longer and more meaningful engagement on your part. Combined with customer profiles—like the kind created when you sign up for newsletters or create an account with a company—they are an essential piece in the development of targeted ads.    

In recent years, policy shifts in several jurisdictions have forced websites to ask users for consent to store cookies on their devices. Such policies, however, are easily out-maneuvered by dark patterns.

On mobile, cookie prompts now effectively block the whole website, bury toggle options, and offer a bold “accept” button upfront.  Designers understand we want to move through a website as quickly as possible, and so such prompts are often immediately dismissed.  

References

1. Natasha Dow Schull. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.