“This website uses cookies – please press continue if you would like to proceed”. With any luck, this banner will soon be forgotten by the human race. Some of the biggest sites in the game are finding ways around using cookies – the little bitty pieces of code that marketers deploy to people’s browsers to track their online movements.

In the past month, Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all come out and openly admitted that they are developing ways of getting around the use of cookies. They basically want to be able to bypass over a thousand software companies that place cookies on websites.

The trouble is, if the big dogs do manage to avoid cookies, they’ll be unsettling a $120 billion global digital advertising industry. Marketers will either be very angry or very confused. Where to next? Scott Meyer, CEO of Evidon Inc, a company that helps businesses keep a tally of the cookies on their websites, says it’s going to get nasty:

There is a Battle Royale brewing. Whoever controls access to all that data can charge rent for it—and has a tremendous advantage going forward.

Marketers are desperately trying to get information from people’s mobile activities – as the mobile platform has always been tricky to track. For instance, they’d love to know when the best time is to flash an ad across the Angry Birds interface. This is where the power shift happens.

Both Microsoft and Google have announced that they will soon be able to produce tracking devices that monitor users’ activity through mobile phones and tablets that use either Microsoft or Google software. This will no doubt have marketers in a bit of a frenzy, wanting to get hold of that stuff as quickly as possible.

Say goodbye to cookies, and say hello to pizza.

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[Source : Wall Street Journal]