Digital marketers have been wringing their hands over the pending loss of third-party cookies for about two years now. Google recently announced that it was delaying plans to block them from its Chrome web browser until sometime in 2025, but it seems virtually inevitable that those plans will proceed at some point.

Part of the reason for the delay is surely to give digital marketers time to prepare. And while some individuals and firms might try using the next several months to try clinging to the third party data tracking that they’ve taken for granted so long, it seems likely that they’ll have to deal with the impact of the change at some point.

Assuming Google doesn’t announce another delay, the change will initially apply only to Chrome. This does leave the door open for digital marketers to keep relying on consumer browsing history to target their ads in other browsers. And this in turn gives them the option to shift most of their marketing activities toward the users of other browsers, and even to encourage part of their existing customer base to ditch Chrome.

Then again, if any digital marketers are persuasive enough to convince people to switch, en masse, to Firefox or Microsoft Edge or another alternative, they probably don’t need the sort of shortcuts that cookies provide in the first place. More to the point, anyone who tries to compel that kind of switch would probably be swimming against the tide. As international concern over data privacy continues to grow, so too will user preferences for the blocking of cookies, and so other browsers will surely follow after Chrome.

For any digital marketers who are willing to evolve and grow along with the landscape of the internet, it probably makes more sense to go with the flow and to adopt the understanding that a cookie-free advertising strategy will not only be necessary in the future, but might actually be beneficial in some ways.

Traditionally, cookies have made it easy to connect on-site advertisements with users whose browsing history already demonstrates interest in or attention to certain categories of goods, as well as specific ecommerce sites. In theory, this maximizes the chances of interested parties navigating back to those same sites and following through on a purchase, which in turn reinforces their browser’s connection to those sites and their products.

But from a user experience standpoint, cookies can be a nuisance. They can leave people feeling as if the same ads are haunting them all across the internet, which has the potential to actually train them to ignore those ads, regardless of their relevance to prior browsing.

In absences of cookies, digital marketers will need to make a more concerted effort to design ads that are relevant to a target audience based not on their prior browsing history but rather on the content and style of the webpage they are actually visiting when they see them. This is potentially a lot more work for those digital marketers in the short term, but it could very well increase the value of their efforts, while also helping the internet of the future to become something more than a place where people are constantly fed what they’ve already said they want, with little opportunity for fresh discovery.

This may be motivating for some digital marketers but not for others. Those who entered the field with any sort of creative ambitions should relish the idea of actually hooking new prospects whether or not they’ve clicked on client sites before. And as cookies are broadly phased out in the years to come, those creative advertisers are the ones that aspiring ecommerce brands should look for.