The first-party trap: architecting the post-cookie tech stack
What most teams call a "first-party stack" is still a rented graph in disguise. A working session on what actually stays yours after the cookie dies.
By T.J. Muro
Published
Updated
Why this exists
Everyone agreed to move to first-party. Almost nobody agreed on what that means. This session walks through the stack most teams end up with, where the leaks still are, and what a genuinely owned data path looks like when the ad networks are no longer the source of truth.
- The three "first-party" architectures that are really still third-party
- Which pieces of the stack you can own outright, and which you have to instrument around
- What verification looks like when there is no shared cookie to reconcile against