If Google’s cookie phase-out ever comes, here’s what a cookie-less future looks like for Mars’ chief brand officer Rankin Carroll

By Kimeko McCoy • February 11, 2025 •

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Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant’s cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear.

Seemingly, Google’s plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future.

“We had what we had, and it was the norm for the standard for the industry,” Carroll said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “As we move beyond that, we’re focused on innovating.”

In talking with Digiday, Carroll laid out Mars’ plans to scale its first-party data across brands like M&Ms and Snickers and the role partnerships play in scaling said plans. Carroll also talked about Mars’ Super Bowl stunt and rehashed the company’s plans to acquire the Kellanova family of snack brands.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

AI and alternative data points

[We’re] leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, obviously, in that regard, because what we find is it lets us do much more by using alternative data points that are often stronger than third-party because we’re able to scan a wider array of data sets. We’re able to correlate and make distinctions within that. The signals are actually potentially stronger and more pointed in a good way, and we’re using consumer-authorized, if you say, data. So we feel good about that progression.

M&Ms first-party data

Our main source of first-party data is the M&Ms brand and a lot of what we do on [direct-to-consumer]. Eighty percent of our first-party [data] is probably coming from that brand. So that has inherent limitations, but we start to take that and enrich it, and try to marry it up with some of the signals we pick up and others. It’s becoming a really interesting place to look, and we’re endeavoring to grow that trove of first-party as well. The largest part of our first-party data comes from the M&M’s brand, at nearly 80%, but the issue with that data is it’s really about our fans. That’s helping us get to know them better, tailor for them more effectively, and plus-up the offerings we give them. We worked with Spotify and took our first-party data and matched it up against playlists and found where there was high indexing between our first-party and the data we were getting out of Spotify. That actually led us to a whole set of insights around how we could execute more effectively, and that became an exciting thing that we’re able to scale.

Collaboration to scale

2025 is where we start to take these ideas to scale. It starts with M&M’s, again, based on the first-party piece. But what we’re also doing is starting to understand that Snickers has a first-party data trove. This is where partnerships start to become super interesting. If I think about Snickers has a partnership with the NFL as one example, there’s a partnership and that conversation has changed dramatically around what’s the give and get between that partnership and where does that lead us from the data. So it’s a data-driven conversation. Different conversations are opening up where we’re only as good as our collaborative mutual benefit. That is opening up our mindset to a data-driven conversation. What is the exchange of data that allows us to create collaborative experiences that are that much more valuable to the consumer, merits their time, their money? But that’s how we will drive to scale.

If Google’s cookie phase-out ever comes, here’s what a cookie-less future looks like for Mars’ chief brand officer Rankin Carroll

As the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, Mars has started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future.