MAM
GUEST COLUMN: How a cookie-less environment will affect the digital space
Mumbai: For the past decade, marketers have been experimenting in the digital environment to enhance brand-customer interactions. In the B2C and B2B spaces, the growth of social platforms has changed how marketers communicate with their clients. In addition, advances in big data and artificial intelligence have enabled marketers to better target and communicate with customers and analyse the impact of their efforts. Third-party cookies are crucial for such advancements.
The advertising/marketing game now stands on the verge of groundbreaking change. Google plans to stop supporting third-party cookies on its Chrome browser by the end of 2023, ultimately ending two decades of media and data-driven performance-focused marketing. As a result, marketing executives and their teams must prepare for a world without cookies by focusing on consent-based advertising and adopting digital transformation strategies for a world without cookies.
We have boiled down the entire marketing plan fitting for a cookie-less world into five steps.
Shift to the first-party data strategy
The websites visitors visit place first-party cookies on their browsers, which the website owner owns. They assist in collecting vital analytical data, language preferences, and the overall delivery of a positive user experience. Companies must make changes in their digital transformation strategy and start investing in developing the ability to acquire first-party data precisely. Businesses must be early adopters and ensure that their first-party cookies are mature enough to gather critical data elements.
According to a Deloitte survey, 61 per cent of high-growth enterprises are shifting to a first-party data strategy.
Start developing second-party relationships
Sharing second-party data is standard among organisations in related domains, and it may be highly advantageous to all parties involved. The company’s first-party data is shared under a contractual arrangement as second-party data to another company. Such mutualistic ties may become increasingly significant for enterprises with a considerable audience overlap in the near future.
This change will only come to fruition once the marketers are willing to rethink their digital transformation strategy for enterprises.
Focus on building rapport with tech giants
Marketers may need to explore outside their boundaries to expand their first-party data. For example, marketers should establish connections with tech giants like Google and Facebook and other media publishers to acquire access to their ‘walled gardens’ of corresponding insights and data to ensure internal data creation.
This step will require exceptional digital transformation services at your business’ disposal.
Reinvent your media spend strategy
Cookie obsolescence would aggravate existing digital ad measurement difficulties, such as transparency and integration standards and attribution accuracy. Instead, reinvent measurement baselines, engage in market research, and lock in essential resources to prepare for an era of advertising experimentation.
Revamping your brand marketing is not a piece of cake. You will require a robust and streamlined process for your digital transformation strategy. Many digital marketing agencies in India offer remarkable digital transformation services for B2B and B2C firms.
Practice contextual targeting
Behavioral targeting tries to collect data on a visitor’s behavior to ensure that the ad is relevant to them while ignoring the context of the ad. Marketers must evolve this strategy and shift to contextual targeting practice, which targets visitors based on the page’s content where the ad appears. As the number of options for giving individualised advertising to audiences decreases, marketers must return to the basics and concentrate on contextual targeting to get their messages to the right audience.
Adapting, surviving, and thriving in a cookie-less world is possible with specific finetuning measures in your digital transformation strategy.
(About Author: Ambika Sharma is the Pulp Strategy founder and managing director)
MAM
Nielsen launches co-viewing pilot to sharpen TV measurement
Super Bowl pilot to refine how shared TV audiences are counted
MUMBAI: Nielsen is taking a fresh stab at one of television’s oldest blind spots: how many people are actually watching the same screen. The audience-measurement giant on February 4 unveiled a co-viewing pilot that uses wearable devices to better capture shared viewing, starting with America’s biggest broadcast stage.
The trial begins with Super Bowl LX on NBC on February 8, 2026, before extending to other high-profile live sports and entertainment events in the first half of the year. The goal is simple but commercially potent: count viewers more accurately, especially during live spectacles that pull families and friends to one screen.
The new approach leans on Nielsen’s proprietary wearable meters, wrist-worn devices that resemble smartwatches. These passively capture audio signatures from TV content, logging exposure to shows, films and live events without requiring viewers to sign in or self-report. In theory, fewer clicks, fewer lapses, better data.
Karthik Rao, Nielsen’s ceo, cast the move as part of a broader measurement push. He said the company’s task is to keep pushing accuracy as clients invest heavily in live programming that draws mass audiences. The co-viewing pilot, he added, builds on upgrades such as Big Data + Panel measurement, out-of-home expansion, live-streaming metrics and wearable-based tracking.
Co-viewing is not new territory for Nielsen, which has long tried to estimate how many people sit before a single set. What is new is the heavier integration of wearables and passive detection to reduce reliance on active inputs from panel homes.
For now, the pilot comes with caveats. Co-viewing estimates from the trial will not be folded into Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel ratings, which remain the industry’s trading currency. Instead, pilot findings will be shared with clients a few weeks after final Big Data + Panel ratings are delivered. Clients may disclose those findings publicly.
More impact data will follow later this year. Full integration into Nielsen’s marketing-intelligence suite is slated as a longer-term play, with a target of bringing co-viewing into currency measurement for the 2026–2027 season. This is only phase one, with further co-viewing enhancements planned beyond 2026 and additional timelines to be announced.
The push fits a wider pattern. Nielsen has in recent years expanded big-data integration, adopted first-party data for live-streaming measurement and broadened out-of-home tracking. It also positions itself as the reference point for streaming metrics through products such as The Gauge and the Nielsen Streaming Top 10.
In a market where billions of ad dollars hinge on decimal points, counting who is in the room matters. If Nielsen can pin down shared viewing, the humble sofa could become prime measurement real estate. The race to count every eyeball just found a new wrist to watch.
Brands
Delhivery chairman Deepak Kapoor, independent director Saugata Gupta quit board
Gurugram: Delhivery’s boardroom is being reset. Deepak Kapoor, chairman and independent director, has resigned with effect from April 1 as part of a planned board reconstitution, the logistics company said in an exchange filing. Saugata Gupta, managing director and chief executive of FMCG major Marico and an independent director on Delhivery’s board, has also stepped down.
Kapoor exits after an eight-year stint that included steering the company through its 2022 stock-market debut, a period that saw Delhivery transform from a venture-backed upstart into one of India’s most visible logistics platforms. Gupta, who joined the board in 2021, departs alongside him, marking a simultaneous clearing of two senior independent seats.
“Deepak and Saugata have been instrumental in our process of recognising the need for and enabling the reconstitution of the board of directors in line with our ambitious next phase of growth,” said Sahil Barua, managing director and chief executive, Delhivery. The statement frames the exits less as departures and more as deliberate succession, a boardroom shuffle timed to the company’s evolving scale and strategy.
The resignations arrive amid broader governance recalibration. In 2025, Delhivery appointed Emcure Pharmaceuticals whole-time director Namita Thapar, PB Fintech founder and chairman Yashish Dahiya, and IIM Bangalore faculty member Padmini Srinivasan as independent directors, signalling a tilt towards consumer, fintech and academic expertise at the board level.
Kapoor’s tenure spanned Delhivery’s most defining years, rapid network expansion, public listing and the push towards profitability in a bruising logistics market. Gupta’s presence brought FMCG and brand-scale perspective during a period when ecommerce volumes and last-mile delivery economics were being rewritten.
The twin exits, effective from the new financial year, underscore a familiar corporate rhythm: founders consolidate, veterans rotate out, and fresh voices are ushered in to script the next chapter. In India’s hyper-competitive logistics race, even the boardroom does not stand still.
MAM
Meta appoints Anuvrat Rao as APAC head of commerce partnerships
At Locofy.ai, Rao helped convert a three-year free beta into a paid engine, clocking 1,000 subscribers and 15 enterprise clients within ten days of launch in September 2024. The low-code startup, backed by Accel and top tech founders, is famed for turning designs into production-ready code using proprietary large design models.
Before that, Rao founded generative AI venture 1Bstories, which was acquired by creative AI platform Laetro in mid-2024, where he briefly served as managing director for APAC. Alongside operating roles, he has been an active investor and advisor since 2020, backing startups such as BotMD, Muxy, Creator plus, Intellect, Sealed and CricFlex through a creator-economy-led thesis.
Rao spent over eight years at Google, holding senior partnership roles across search, assistant, chrome, web and YouTube in APAC, and earlier cut his teeth in strategy consulting at OC&C in London and investment finance at W. P. Carey in Europe and the US.
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