Rising CTV advert spend, funding in retail media networks and a retreat to secure bets like paid social amid an unstable economic system are a few of the largest storylines occupying the advertising and marketing foreground proper now.
Within the background, they’re additionally contributing to the top of CPG advertisers’ long-term reliance on the third celebration cookie.
The business’s transition away from the cookie slowed, however hasn’t stalled following Google’s retreat from deprecation. Forrester’s Q2 2025 Pulse survey discovered that 35% have been reconsidering spending on cookie alternate options in response to Google’s cookie deprecation walkback — however 53% anticipated to keep up present advert spend, whereas persevering with cookieless experiments or investments this 12 months.
One other Forrester research of 1,000 B2C entrepreneurs discovered that 68% had invested in zero- or first-party information assortment, whereas 69% have been testing extra context-based promoting strategies.
Regardless of the shortage of urgency over deprecation, advertisers are a lot much less reliant on it than they have been. CPG purchasers, nevertheless, are among the many manufacturers final to maneuver on from the tech. Barring DTC companies, their enterprise fashions imply they lack alternatives to gather first-party data on their clients, so by their nature, CPG advertisers are reliant on different events for fine-tuned viewers data.
“They don’t have a spine of different information. And for an business sector like this, which is so closely marketed, having credible information sources is tremendous necessary,” stated Pete Wallace, managing director EMEA at contextual concentrating on supplier GumGum.
However investments in retail media information, in addition to different IDs and cookieless strategies like contextual concentrating on, are transferring them on from the third-party cookie. And the alternatives offered by CTV – the size of linear tv with the addressability of digital media – present the pull issue.
With these advertisers trying in direction of different technique of discovering their goal shopper, the third-party cookie is turning into all however out of date, the final resort of manufacturers taking a scattergun, imprecise strategy to their programmatic exercise.
Information vendor and different ID supplier ID5, for instance, has seen an inflow of CPG manufacturers seeking to enhance their information options. “It’s undoubtedly ramped up over the past 18 months,” stated CEO Mathieu Roche. The variety of initiatives taken on for CPG purchasers has tripled in two years, he added.
Although he didn’t share exact figures, Wallace stated GumGum had additionally seen an increase in funding from CPGs. “We’ve seen an uptick in curiosity in contextual options. We’ve seen extra CPG manufacturers leaping on our pre-bid activation,” he stated.
Rachel Gantz, managing director of Proximic by Comscore, stated that CPG advertisers had elevated their use of its “Predictive Audiences” customized concentrating on resolution, which doesn’t use cookies, by 66% within the first half of the 12 months. “That development underscores the urgency with which manufacturers are embracing cookieless options that don’t transact on person identifiers, guaranteeing they will scale their campaigns successfully whereas future-proofing their methods,” she stated.
One cause is manufacturers’ rising funding in CTV and on-line video spend, which has drawn budgets away from linear tv. Practically two-thirds (66%) of entrepreneurs in North America anticipate to extend their CTV spending this 12 months, per Nielsen’s 2025 Annual Advertising and marketing Report.
CTV is an “more and more massive element of how [brands] attain their audiences,” stated Kate Puccinelli, chief buyer officer at Nexxen. That’s meant fewer {dollars} flowing into cookie-dependent elements of the promoting ecosystem.
“CPGs wish to be the place the patron is, and the extra shoppers are spending time in CTV environments, the extra that they’re going to gravitate to that,” stated Tim Rogers, Pubmatic vp of commerce media.
At cellular SSP VideoHeroes, CPG consumer funding rose 33% between the primary and second quarters of 2025. “We’ve seen a 28% improve in H1 2025 in comparison with H1 2024, and we anticipate this development to proceed,” stated Edward Castillo, its head of demand and partnerships.
The opposite, arguably larger, cause is CPG funding in retail media. Three-fourths (74%) of entrepreneurs contemplate RMNs extra necessary to their media technique in 2025, in line with Nielsen’s research.
“Most CPG manufacturers proceed to be underneath excessive margin strain and the trouble it takes to gather and goal first-party information – and even third-party – with a purpose to generate gross sales is outclassed by the truth that Amazon and Walmart, to call a pair, have made it very easy,” stated Rick Stalling, chief information officer at Croud.
A Pubmatic survey performed in December discovered that on common, retailers’ income from their media networks made up 7% of their general revenues, up from 1.5% in 2021. “Retail media is enabling [CPG] manufacturers to make the most of buy intent and that buy historical past … actually priceless indicators that manufacturers will wish to use as a way to focus on the best shopper,” stated Rogers.
For years, cookies lay on the finish of the trail of least resistance for entrepreneurs. Now, stated Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai, “the simplest factor to do is to lease indicators from retailers and to search out proxies of intent in Walmart’s dataset and Goal’s dataset.”
Although media businesses typically choose to not acknowledge it, finances constraints and a perception that nearer concentrating on can ship extra sure outcomes on media spend are additionally behind the shift, simply as they’re behind the ever-increasing paid social spending (per WARC, world paid social funding is anticipated to achieve $286.2 billion this 12 months, up 12.3% in contrast with 2024.)
“When you consider how the price of items are impacting margins, and now you’ve investments in AI impacting margins … there’s a single pool of {dollars} … and the promoting pool is shrinking,” stated one holding firm media purchaser, who exchanged anonymity for candor.
They added: “My speculation on that’s it’s a lot much less about third-party cookie deprecation, and way more making an attempt to spend their promoting {dollars} properly.”
