Cookie monsters. Anatomy of a digital market infrastructure

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to examine the market arrangements built by the online marketing industry around small pieces of data now ubiquitous in digital markets–namely “http cookies.” We show how cookies have become the backbone and the main vehicle of a vast market infrastructure, based on its ability to transform online behavioral information into data assets, and to attach these assets to advertising products. We examine the complex trading operations that are implemented from the elementary brick that constitutes the cookie. We also raise the question of the strength and durability of this infrastructure, at a time when it is disputed and seems weakened. Beyond the particular case of cookies, we identify three main operations that market infrastructures typically support: knowledge production, capitalization, and coordination. We also highlight the centrality of “datafication” (tracking, “data lake” building, matching, etc.) in the process of market digitalization. We thus contribute to the framing of the concept of (digital) market infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Market studies
• digitalization
• cookies
• online advertising
• market infrastructure
• personal data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Beauvisage is a sociologist and web scientist at the Social Sciences Department of Orange Labs (Sense). His early works and PhD focused on web usage mining and browsing behavior characterization. Today, his activities involve both internet research and market studies; his current research topics cover online participatory market devices, advertising and e-reputation, and uses of online media. He is also involved in methodological investigations on the use of quantitative behavioral material for social science.

Kevin Mellet is a sociologist at the Social Sciences Department of Orange Labs (Sense) and an associate researcher to the LISIS (University Paris-Est Marnes la Vallée). His research is based primarily on economic sociology and science and technology studies and focuses on digital markets, from the standpoint of market intermediaries, businesses, and consumers. He is interested in issues related to online visibility and reputation. More recently, he has been investigating the infrastructures, devices, and practices of the emerging “data marketing” landscape.

Notes

1 Vincent Tessier, Vice President of ad-tech firm Adsquare, in Jaimes N., 2018, « Comment l’adtech peut-il survivre au monde post-cookie ? » [tr: how can adtech survive in a post-cookie world?], Journal du Net, September.

2 Hence the reference to Cookie Monster in the title of this article. Cookie Monster is a muppet from the TV show Sesame Street, well known for his taste for cookies. The gluttony of Cookie Monster, and his particular taste for cookies, make him the perfect symbol of the online advertising industry, which as a whole has been characterized in recent years by its fierce appetite for online tracking, and by its immoderate taste for cookies. This reference to popular culture has not remained foreign to the world of technology and advertising, since Cookie Monster is the name given to a web extension that automatically erases cookies; it is also the name of the core component of major advertising technology firm AppNexus’ infrastructure, its huge server-side cookie database.

3 Display refers to several forms of advertising which appear on publishers’ websites, next to editorial content: banners, text ads, rich media, video ads, etc. (see Beuscart and Mellet 2013).

4 This identifier gives the cookie the status of “personal data” within privacy laws.

5 A common representation of this complexity is the so-called “Lumascape,” a diagram that circulates widely among advertising professionals to describe the programmatic value chain, the different types of intermediaries involved, and the myriad players involved.

6 See for example: “Google is a cookie monster” (eMarketer, August 2018); “European Commission proposal will kill 3rd party cookies” (PageFair, January 2017); “Will 2018 kill user segmentation and targeting (GDPR, Safari browser’s restrictions on cookies)?” (Quora, January 2018); “Will GDPR kill the third-party data market?” (MyCustomer, March 2018).