Mathieu Roche is cofounder and CEO of ID5, a company that provides “privacy-first user identification for digital advertising.” When Google announced last week that it was “expanding the testing” for the Privacy Sandbox for the Web, it pushed back the date it plans to eliminate cookies until 2024.

While others fear this, Roche welcomes the demise of cookies. We spoke with Roche about why that is, and what Google is up to. Below are excerpts (edited for clarity) from that conversation.

Marketing Daily: Why do you think Google pushed back the date?

Roche: I think they don’t really care. I think for them, no decision is better than a decision. Because it almost feels like if they come to a decision, you know, it’s kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

They almost need the industry to kind of become cookie-less on its own before they’re making a decision. Otherwise, they’re going to be accused of being either, you know, pro- or anti-privacy or anti other businesses.

And either way, they lose. So I think they have really good air cover.

Marketing Daily: How many marketers out there do you estimate are you currently using cookies right now?

Roche: All of them. Cookies are the foundation of digital advertising. Everybody uses cookie to do audience qualification, targeting measurements, frequency capping, attribution.

There are alternatives, but they’re all workarounds —  and they’re only being tested.

Marketing Daily: Do you expect Google to push back the date once more?

Roche: I hope that the market will realize that [things] needs to change, right? And we’re seeing that already. And I think the pressure that brands and publishers are putting on the industry is getting higher and higher. We see more and more use cases coming out or kind of examples coming out of people using solutions like the identified services. And so hopefully those kinds of learnings will kind of percolate and will encourage the industry to adopt solutions like ours, at which point Google  won’t need an excuse anymore.

Marketing Daily: What can marketers do right now, as they’re anticipating this move?

Roche: There’s plenty of ways to test new means of addressing customers and of measuring campaign performance without renewing cookies. And that’s what smart publishers and smart brands are doing.

They can continue to do more of this. And the more they do, the more the market can rally around and organically adopt new methods.

Marketing Daily: And when you look at like 2030 or something, how do you predict that marketers are going to be identifying users? And are they using something like a cookie?

Roche: Cookie alternatives? Yes, certainly What we do is build an infrastructure that replaces cookies as a means to identify customers and devices. So we believe that will be one of the infrastructures that brands and publishers will be using to continue to run addressable advertising in on browsers, and the same thing is happening in mobile apps. And the same thing is gonna happen in connected television.

So across the board, right, we’re reinventing the way we we identify customers and devices. And I strongly believe that will be the framework for the future.

ID5’s Mathieu Roche says Google’s “kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t” in making hard decision to help end cookies.