Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer at Firefox, is leaving his position after more than four years to join Lytics as its first president. 

Lytics—a customer data platform (CDP) used to organize and store first-party data for brands such as Nestle Purina and The Economist—is part of a growing category among marketers following the removal of third-party cookies by major browsers such as Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Brave and Google Chrome. 

Kaykas-Wolff’s departure occurs as much of the ad industry is at odds with browsers such as Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Publishers and ad tech executives say browsers have become too powerful, and are making significant changes in consumer privacy and third-party cookies without input from the industry at large. 

Third-party cookies are used for measurement and frequency capping. Media buyers also use them to cheaply target consumers with large swaths of ads. Kaykas-Wolff is both critical of third-party cookies and the decision by browsers to kill them off. 

“When browsers make changes, they are in response to the reality that technology companies have abused the tools they use and aren’t treating people like humans,” Kaykas-Wolff says. “It’s why I think the CDP category is so important.” 

Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle are all rolling out CDPs, which act as warehouses to store and organize first-party data and are widely viewed as a replacement for data management platforms. 

In the last decade, Kaykas-Wolff says, "third-party cookies, marketplaces and third-party data brokering systems have helped companies stop treating people like human beings. They treat people as if they are a line in their datum.”

“Consumer expectations are different now,” Kaykas-Wolff says. “Everything from the introduction to an ad message, to onboarding and product is custom-tailored to them. A CDP is first and foremost a better view into who a brand’s customers and prospects are.”