Brands fear buying ad campaigns across a patchwork of walled gardens will become much harder when cookies are culled. But media owners are busy building their own ecosystems and first party identity graphs – with little love lost between fierce rivals. Unless Australia's big publishers can collaborate and interoperate, agencies and consultants think Facebook and Google will take an even larger share of digital marketing budgets.

Tech firms are scrambling to create cookie replacements by either using email-based identifiers or by gluing together all the browser and other device identifiers they can muster. The problem is, many of Australia’s big publishers appear reluctant to use them – and fear being gamed again on their audience data by agencies and adtech players per cookies – while audience match rates are low. Right now it's a three horse race. The question for alt-ID providers, advertisers and publishers is whether they can reach the finish line before platforms and regulators raise the red flag.

Who's thinking what on first party data, privacy, identity and digital marketing 2.0? How are they doing it? Adore Beauty. ANZ. Blis. Cashrewards. CommBank. Civic Data. Gumtree. GroupM. Karlsgate. Little Birdie. LiveRamp. Matterkind. Media.Monks. Menulog. MiQ. Narrative. News Corp. Nine Entertainment. Pega Systems. PubMatic. Resolution Digital. Seven West Media. Taronga Zoo. The Guardian. The Lumery. The Trade Desk. Venntifact. 10 ViacomCBS. X15 Ventures. Westpac. Yahoo. Plus Anna Johnston, Peter Leonard and Phil Eligio. Disparate views. Different positions. All about data. Everything explained.