As we all know, cookies have been an integral part of interactive marketing since it's inception. Privacy issue's surrounding cookies have been disputed for a long time, and Google has been very careful with it's use of cookies as well as other third party ad serving technologies.
Over the last few months Google has been making some exciting moves in the advertising space. Some of them had me wondering, "has hell frozen over?"
The first move by Google was their announcement that adsense publishers would be allowed to serve ads unsing third party ad servers; and when there are third party ad servers, there are third party cookies!
The other, more recent annoucement was Google's new media planning tool, Ad Planner. The tool leverages data from the Google toolbar (and other sources) in order to help media planners ad sites to their plans based on demographics, geographics and most interesting, co-visitation habits.
In light of all of these changes that are taking place inside the Googleplex, many are beginning to question Google's ability to remain "unevil". As a result Google has been spending some time educating consumers on their privacy policies (which are now on the Google homepage).
In light of all of this education about privacy, I thought it would be fitting to post a video created by Google in January about the use of cookies. I am sure most of you reading this are familiar with all this info, but I thought it would be fun to bring this video to the surface, given that Google is now operating more heavily in third party cookieland.