In early 2021, Apple upended the mobile app ecosystem with a simple prompt: would users allow an app to track their mobile behavior across apps and websites or not? Called App-Tracking Transparency (ATT), the feature allows users to, with the tap of a button, request to not be tracked, a headwind worth billions to companies like Meta and Snap, which had built their businesses around tracking users for mobile advertising.

A little over three years later, Google appears to be taking a page from Apple’s playbook.

This week, the world’s biggest advertiser shocked the industry with a blog post declaring that it would pivot away from its years-long plan to deprecate third-party cookies within the world’s most popular browser, Chrome. Instead, the company detailed, it will simply ask users whether or not they want them.

“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Google’s Anthony Chavez proposed in the post.

Whether consumers approach any Chrome browser prompt the same way they did on iPhones remains to be seen, but ad-tech executives told Marketing Brew the announcement still likely spells out the end of the cookie—only this time, it will be at the hands of everyday users, not Google.

“We as an industry have to acknowledge that consumers hate the way we use their data, and given the choice, they will overwhelmingly say no,” Joe Root, co-founder of the publisher-focused ad-tech company Permutive, told Marketing Brew.

Continue reading here.—RB

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GoGo Squeez is break dancing its way to a new brand image.

The snack brand, best known for its squeezable applesauce pouches, has largely come to be associated with babies or toddlers, but its latest product and marketing push is meant to tap into a slightly older, more active audience.

To help grow the brand beyond its original target demo—households with kids ages six to 12—GoGo Squeez designed a new fruit blend with electrolytes that’s meant to be used as a sports snack, and to promote it, the brand has partnered with Logan “Logistx” Edra, who’s competing in the first-ever Olympic breaking event—the competitive form of break dancing.

“We’re on a journey to age up our brand,” CMO Mark Anthony Edmonson told Marketing Brew. “We are now seeing young adults and teens recognizing that this is something that they missed out on,” he later added. “They forgot about us, and now they’re returning back to the brand.”

Break it down: The idea to associate with sports came about after Edmonson’s team noticed that consumers were using the product while they were getting active, like bringing it on hikes or bike rides. Beyond that, some sports nutritionists the brand was working with mentioned recommending it to clients, and the team spotted it on the sidelines of some professional sports games, he said.

Breaking is certainly one of the lesser-known Olympic sports, but that’s one of the reasons GoGo Squeez was drawn to it, according to Edmonson. In addition, breaking is popular among the brand’s new target audience of teens and young adults, he said.

“We’ve always been an innovative brand,” he said. “We wanted to partner with a sport that was the first, and something that could actually be big.”

Keep reading here.—AM

Pinterest is not only a millennial-favorite tool to curate dream wedding or apartment aesthetics, but a place consumers—increasingly Gen Z consumers—are discovering brands and products, and eventually, making purchases.

Of the searches pinners make, 96% are not branded (rather than “Nike running shoes” they’re looking for “new shoes,” for example), indicating a “fertile open mind” that makes them welcoming of all content, including ads, how Pinterest makes it revenue, Carrie Sweeney, Pinterest’s VP of retail who works with its 300 retail clients, told Retail Brew. Therefore, Pinterest has been working to make all surfaces on the platform seamlessly shoppable, and Sweeney shared the platform’s strategy for working with retailers and bringing in new shoppers.

Pinterest doesn’t convert sales on its site like platforms like Instagram. Can you share why that is?

We thought about it a lot. Certainly to each their own, and social commerce is such an interesting space right now…We don’t want to compete with retailers. We want to be a retailer’s best friend. We feel like we have our strength in the value chain of that inspiration and moving them through the middle of the funnel, which is no longer a funnel. It’s such a journey…We just really found that we don’t want to be in the business of checkout and fulfillment and all those other retail expertises. We have ours, they have theirs, and we’d rather pass them off to do it well.

We’ve absolutely dabbled in different types of native checkout and commerce, and there’s a lot of ways we can keep doing seamless handoff and really frictionless and fast handoffs to the retailer so the user will barely notice that they’re leaving. We just didn’t feel like it needed to happen on us. It wasn’t authentic; why force a user to convert on us when there are many other platforms that are ready and willing to convert on?

You have a Gen Z audience that’s growing. Is that a selling point when you’re meeting with retailers about advertising?

Absolutely. So many of our retailers are so sophisticated, they’re very aware that they need to protect and safeguard their loyalists, and especially in the case of some department stores, some large mega mass merchants—a lot of that is an older mom or a woman in her 30s and 40s who’s controlling the purse strings for her entire family and buying clothes. So we certainly never neglect them, and we certainly have that demographic, but it’s been so fun to see this Gen Z [audience] develop, and all these retailers are very aware that that’s the next generation of loyal customers they’re cultivating.

Read more on Retail Brew.—EC

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Executive moves across the industry.

• Cracker Barrel has a new CMO. Sarah Moore takes over after a 16-year stint at MGM Resorts.
• 4A’s CEO, Marla Kaplowitz, announced that she will be leaving the role next May.
• Sony Pictures Entertainment tapped Drew Shearer to be its CFO starting in October.