The phaseout of third-party cookies is reshaping digital marketing communication by disrupting how advertisers target audiences, allocate budgets, and justify media and messaging choices. While firms in developed markets are investing in first-party data and AI-driven tools, advertisers in emerging markets face infrastructural and organisational constraints that complicate these decisions. This study examines how advertisers in Bangladesh evaluate cookieless alternatives, focusing on organisational role, work experience, and perceived cost-effectiveness. Drawing on the heuristic-systematic model and cognitive load theory, Study 1 surveys 196 advertisers and shows that specialists rely more on systematic evaluation of information quality, whereas managers place greater weight on heuristic feasibility cues such as compatibility. Study 2 uses expert interviews analysed through the Technology-Organisation-Environment framework to contextualise these patterns and highlights regulatory pressure, skills gaps, and organisational silos. The findings extend dual-process theory in marketing communication by showing that evaluative cue weighting is role-embedded and shaped by resource and organisational constraints rather than uniformly applied. Practically, they underscore the importance of cross-role coordination and feasibility-oriented cost framing when planning cookieless strategies in budget-constrained settings.
Rahman et al. (Mon,) studied this question.