We were all at the edge of our seats last week as the entire industry tuned in each day of the DOJ vs. Google antitrust trial. 

The ad tech world is on high alert, gripping the industry with every twist and turn. To help make sense of it all, the AdMonsters editors dive deep into the first week of the trial in our premiere episode of ‘Google on Trial.’ This is more than just a courtroom drama—it’s a potential turning point for publishers, advertisers, and digital media.

In this episode, Lynne, Andrew, and I unpack key moments, testimonies, and implications that could reshape how we think about Google’s role in ad tech. We explore everything from data brokerage and market manipulation to publishers’ challenging negotiations with Google. The discussion even touches on global regulatory impacts, secretive maneuvers by Google, and how small players might be the most affected.

Curious to hear the full breakdown? Watch the video and join us in dissecting this critical moment for the industry.

Lynne’s Takeaways:

Data Brokerage and Market Manipulation – Lynne references an AdMonsters article by Adam Heimlich, arguing that Google’s true power lies in its massive data trove and how it uses it to broker ad placements. Google’s dominance is not just about having better tech but leveraging data to manipulate the ad marketplace in its favor.

Global Regulatory Impact – The trial could have global implications. She mentions fines imposed on Google and Apple in Europe and the UK’s CMA pushing for more transparency in ad tech. This trial could be part of a larger global reckoning against tech giants like Google and Apple, or “GApple.”

Stephanie Layser’s Testimony – Lynne highlights former NewsCorp exec Stephanie Layser’s testimony about publishers feeling held hostage by Google’s dominance. The lack of transparency and the difficulty of finding alternative demand sources means that publishers are stuck with Google, despite the potential for higher costs and complications if they switch away.

Yakira’s Takeaways:

Negotiating with Google Was Never Easy – Yakira emphasizes Goodway Group’s Jay Friedman’s testimony, noting that negotiating with Google is almost impossible due to its dominance. Friedman compared the alternative options to Google’s services as choosing between high-end and budget hotels, underscoring the unrealistic nature of switching away from Google without suffering revenue losses.

Header Bidding Was ‘Not the Answer – Header bidding was supposed to provide an alternative to Google’s dominance, but it actually made things worse for some publishers. Gannett’s attempt to switch to header bidding led to a 15-20% increase in CPMs, illustrating the difficulty of finding viable alternatives to Google’s ad services.

Why Is Google Being So Secretive? – Google’s attempts to exclude certain testimonies and make the switch from a jury to a bench trial by paying the government $2 million. This move highlights Google’s extensive power and raises questions about their transparency and motives in the trial.

Andrew’s Takeaways: 

The Small Player’s Reliance on Google – Small businesses and publishers see Google’s ad tech as a cost-effective and streamlined solution. Breaking up Google’s ad business could complicate ad management and increase costs, negatively impacting their ability to advertise and grow.

Check My Ads’s Two Cents – Ariel Garcia from Check My Ads argues that Google’s monopolistic practices stifle competition and transparency in the ad tech space. The trial could lead to structural changes and more global regulation, and reignite discussions on legislative measures like the America Act for digital media transparency.

What’s Next?

The trial has highlighted the complexity of breaking up major tech monopolies, the potential ripple effects on small businesses and publishers, and the intricate balance between legislative oversight and market self-regulation.

Stay tuned for weekly updates and deep dives as we continue to unpack this monumental trial. We will bring you the latest developments and expert analyses on what it all means for the future of digital media and ad tech.

Bye everyone, and see you next week!

The post Inside the DOJ’s Big Tech Showdown: AdMonsters Breaks Down Week 1 of Google’s High-Stakes Trial appeared first on AdMonsters.

At this point, it’s not news that years of ongoing changes in data privacy regulation have created massive amounts of change in the way that data is being used (or not used) across the advertising industry.

As IAB Tech Lab CEO, Anthony Katsur, often says, “Just like energy, finance, or healthcare, advertising is now a regulated industry.” As part of this trend, publishers face challenges in creating sustainable revenue growth.

Navigating Data Privacy in Advertising

Whether it’s the continuing decline in ad revenue that digital publishers are grappling with or the never-ending struggle that the streaming television industry is having to reach profitability it’s clear that owners and publishers of media are feeling the effects of these changes.

One of the areas where these changes are most visible is within the publisher’s data technology stacks. Increasingly, publishers are centralizing the many data sources they need for monetization within their data warehouse. While this evolution brings the promise of insights and connectivity, publishers also need a purpose-built application layer to help them activate and get the most value from their data.

DMPs: From Central Role to Obsolescence

For years publishers relied on DMPs to be at the center of their monetization efforts. As cookie-based monetization becomes less and less dependable and publishers’ distribution channels continue to fragment outside of the web these systems have failed to develop new solutions for key functions like app and historical data collection, 2nd-party audience enrichment, and programmatic activation.

This leaves most legacy DMPs relegated to web-based data collection, audience segmentation, and simple ad-serving activation. Additionally, traditional DMPs were not built with important capabilities such as data clean rooms, identity resolution, and PETs which are extremely important in our privacy-centric world.

Data Warehouses: A New Hub for Monetization

Many DMPs have responded by integrating large data sets through mergers and acquisitions to help fill gaps around identity, some are playing catch up by trying to build more privacy-centric features like identity and clean rooms, and others have decided to completely go out of the business. A response to this lack of innovation by DMPs in recent years has been more organizations investing in their data warehouse to centralize their various audience data sources. The question is, is the data warehouse alone enough?

The Missing Piece: Purpose-Built Applications

As we talk to customers in the market it’s clear that they need applications that can work with their data warehouse to create efficiencies and grow their revenue. One of the biggest challenges is actually activating data.

Data warehouses often rely on applications and integration providers to make data more actionable which leaves publishers building expensive custom solutions and navigating complicated operations.

Similarly to how the Composable CDP movement has stepped up to help marketers evolve how they activate data in their warehouse, media owners and publishers (and new companies like retail media) need solutions that are purpose-built for both the era of privacy as well as ad monetization use cases.

Embracing the Future of Audience Monetization

Audience monetization platforms of the future need to be able to combine the streamlined audience building and activation (in both programmatic and direct)  that legacy DMPs relied on, while also allowing for more complex tasks like normalizing various data sources, running complex identity resolution models and collaborating within data clean rooms.

As free and scaled 3rd-party cookie data goes away the monetization is shifting to the publishers and media owners who are investing appropriately in their 1st-party-data, and there’s a major opportunity to create profitable growth. Investing in technology to help power this growth is crucial and will separate the winners from the losers during this period of change.

The post The Data Warehouse Has Replaced Many DMP Functions, but Is It Enough for Publisher Data Monetization? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Audience targeting and improved ad relevance are critical in today’s highly competitive media environment. With the rapid proliferation of digital content, advertisers and publishers face an unprecedented challenge in reaching and engaging their desired audiences.

That’s why this integration of Yahoo ConnectID with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) could not have come at a better time, particularly as the industry navigates the challenges of a cookieless environment.

This seamless integration allows publishers who have adopted LiveRamp’s ATS to unlock additional demand from Yahoo DSP, substantially improving the monetization of their addressable supply. “Demand-side interoperability has been a key feature, and now, with our expanded partnership, publishers can achieve greater scale and better monetization through Yahoo ConnectID,” explains Chandra Cirulnick, VP, Global Supply Partnerships at Yahoo DSP.

 By harnessing advanced identity solutions such as Yahoo ConnectID, marketers can accurately identify user preferences and behaviors in a privacy-centric way, ensuring their messages are delivered to the right people at the right time. This approach enhances user experience, drives higher engagement, and improves overall campaign performance.

How Yahoo ConnectID Boosts Audience Engagement and Revenue

The benefits are clear. Publishers leveraging Yahoo ConnectID have seen, on average, a 40% higher eCPM for Yahoo ConnectID impressions than those without it. Additionally, the win rate for advertisers and publishers is, on average, 34.3% higher when Yahoo ConnectID is available. For non-addressable supply, Yahoo Next-Gen Solutions provide on average, an impressive 76% higher eCPM and a 37.5% higher win rate. This dual approach ensures publishers maximize their revenue regardless of user authentication status.

Yahoo’s integration with LiveRamp’s ATS also future-proofs addressable advertising. By expanding Yahoo ConnectID’s footprint and refining its integration, Yahoo is committed to improving addressability for publishers and advertisers. The tech behemoth also plans on incorporating industry solutions like Google Privacy Sandbox, ensuring a robust and resilient identity solution strategy.

Powered by 205 million direct, consent-based consumer relationships in the US, Yahoo ConnectID leverages 200 billion daily cross-screen signals to build comprehensive user and household profiles. This depth of data allows for precise targeting and enhanced audience insights, enabling both publishers and advertisers to thrive despite the deprecation of third-party cookies.

Publisher Praise: Real-World Success Stories 

Publishers are already singing the integration’s praises. For instance, Dish Media has been able to extend advertisers’ reach. “Yahoo ConnectID empowers our advertisers to access new, potentially interested audiences across Yahoo’s extensive network, ensuring enhanced reach and effectiveness for their campaigns,” shares Andrew Tint, General Manager of Programmatic at Dish Media. Jeff Quandt, VP, Revenue Partnerships at Allen Media Group echoes that sentiment, highlighting that Yahoo ConnectID allows for a more tailored ad experience and better measurement of media investments.

Another notable example of publisher success with the Yahoo ConnectID comes from Philo, a programmatic-first television company. “The integration with Yahoo ConnectID aligns perfectly with our strategy and strengthens our connection with advertisers using the Yahoo platform, enhancing their ability to find their most valuable segments on Philo and deliver relevant ads to our audience. This capability to provide precise audience targeting and improved ad relevance is critical,” shares Aulden Kaye, Philo’s Head of Advertising Partnerships, when articulating the advantage.

These success stories underscore the broader trend of industry leaders leveraging advanced identity solutions to remain competitive. As ad tech evolves, the reliance on third-party cookies has become increasingly untenable, necessitating the adoption of innovative strategies to maintain ad efficacy. Yahoo ConnectID offers the agility required to navigate these changes, providing publishers with robust tools to address the impending demise of third-party cookies. By integrating such cutting-edge technology, publishers can maintain and even enhance their advertising capabilities, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the industry.

Setting New Industry Benchmarks for the Future 

The Yahoo DSP is committed to collaboration and interoperability to enable publishers and advertisers to effectively communicate and resonate with their audiences in a highly fragmented landscape. The tech leader’s ongoing enhancements and partnerships are positioning Yahoo ConnectID as a pivotal player in digital advertising, driving not only efficiency but also superior outcomes.

For publishers strategizing to future-proof their advertising operations and optimize monetization in a cookieless world, the integration with Yahoo ConnectID emerges as a strategic choice. The platform offers sophisticated identity resolution capabilities meant to significantly enhance audience understanding, campaign precision, and overall ROI. 

Learn more about this powerful tool here. 

The post Yahoo ConnectID’s New Integration Boosts Publisher Profits Without Cookies appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a detailed discussion with AdMonsters’ Yakira Young, James Rosewell, co-founder of Movement for an Open Web, discussed the nuances of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) recent report and concerns regarding Google’s Privacy Sandbox. 

Exploring the pivotal changes and challenges in digital privacy and competition, this analysis highlights the tension between innovation and regulation, examining how new policies may reshape the digital advertising landscape. 

Here are Rosewell’s insights into the evolving dynamics of digital privacy and its potential ramifications for the industry. This recap highlights the significant aspects of his analysis, touching on the tensions between privacy, competition, and interoperability, as well as the future steps for addressing these emerging challenges.

Tensions at the Triangular Table

• Digital Industry’s Inflection Point: Rosewell describes the CMA’s April report as a pivotal moment that could dictate future directions for digital advertising and privacy. It’s a tipping point for the digital industry, marking significant changes in the regulatory landscape.
• Interplay of Competition and Privacy: The report underscores the ongoing tension between competition and privacy, pointing to the need for balance between these elements.
• Interagency Dynamics: Rosewell clarifies the distinct roles of the ICO and CMA in the UK’s regulatory framework, emphasizing their collaborative yet focused mandates on privacy and competition, respectively.
• Google’s Compliance Challenges: The ongoing scrutiny over whether Google’s Privacy Sandbox meets the dual mandates of the ICO and CMA.
• Future Projections for Google: Insights into potential changes Google might need to implement to align with regulatory expectations.

Unpacking Compliance and Concerns

• Non-Compliance with ICO Guidelines: Rosewell points out significant gaps in Google’s adherence to privacy standards, particularly in how the Privacy Sandbox handles data. While Google’s Privacy Sandbox has not fully complied with the ICO’s privacy guidelines, this could signal significant shifts in how data privacy is managed. Rosewell suggests that the ongoing non-compliance could lead to more stringent oversight and possibly a rethinking of current data privacy frameworks.
• Technical Shortcomings in APIs: There are concerns about the technical limitations and the potential misuse of de-identified data. The report details criticism of how privacy APIs might still be processing personal data, indicating a lack of true anonymization.
• Call for Clarity and Compliance: Upcoming, more detailed ICO reports, are expected to address these compliance issues. 
• Stakeholder Feedback: Reflections on the broader industry concerns regarding the overreach of the Privacy Sandbox beyond basic legal frameworks.

Governance and Technical Hurdles

• Need for Robust Governance: The discussion emphasizes the essential role of governance in managing digital practices fairly and transparently.
• Governance in Digital Operations: There is a necessity for proper governance frameworks that ensure fairness and compliance in digital operations, as opposed to automated, unchecked processes.
• Challenges of Ensuring Reliability: There are limitations in current technological solutions like the Attribution Reporting API’s Coordinator Service.
• Industry’s Call for Protection: There is a potential need for warranty language to safeguard the interests of advertisers and ad tech partners.
• Technical Challenges of Latency: The discussion of latency issues within digital platforms, emphasizes the limitations of browser-based solutions and the potential need for server-side solutions.

The Smaller Players’ Predicament

• Disproportionate Impact on Smaller Entities: Changes driven by the Privacy Sandbox could particularly challenge smaller publishers and advertisers.
• Potential for Increased Market Consolidation: Stringent privacy regulations may inadvertently push smaller players towards more restrictive platforms and into less competitive environments.

Looking Ahead: Remedies and Regulations

• Advocacy for Meaningful Dialogue: Rosewell calls for a balanced discussion that does not sacrifice interoperability, privacy, or competition.
• Engagement with Regulation: The importance of engaging with regulatory processes to influence and adapt to new market conditions.
• Envisioning Future Remedies: Data labeling and enhanced privacy guidelines could serve as potential solutions for the industry.

In this crucial moment for digital advertising, Rosewell’s insights underscore the importance of a collaborative regulatory approach that balances innovation with privacy and competition. As the industry anticipates the next phases of the CMA’s evaluations and Google’s responses, the continued dialogue at AdMonsters Ops — during Rosewell’s closing keynote June 4, 2024 — promises to provide a vital forum for shaping the future of digital advertising. 

The challenges and opportunities discussed highlight the critical need for an industry-wide dialogue and cooperation to ensure that future developments benefit all stakeholders.

The post LinkedIn Live Rewind: Unpacking the Implications of CMA’s Surveillance on Google’s Privacy Sandbox appeared first on AdMonsters.

According to Eli Heath, Head of Identity at Lotame, this underscores advertisers’ need to explore alternative strategies to ensure brand safety and ad quality through data curation.

Heath asserts that solutions like Lotame Collaborate via Spherical can help marketers shift towards more precise, curated marketplaces (PMPs) by aligning their data with publisher datasets for targeted advertising. Furthermore, we spoke with Heath about how Lotame’s Spherical Platform tackles the MFA problem by actively managing inventory quality, fostering collaborations with brands and SSPs, and more.

Andrew Byrd: Despite the prominent MFA scourge that happened last year, the Adalytics report revealed that MFA sites are still prevalent in the industry. Why is that the case?

Eli Heath: Two reasons we cannot eradicate MFAs: Buyer time and resources and buyer KPIs. 

Buyers, particularly at agencies, are extremely stretched. Many buyers establish allow lists at the campaign launch, but active site list management often falls by the wayside following the launch. It requires significant effort to pull domain reports, cross reference to known MFAs (which are source-specific and always changing), validate, and make updates to include lists.

Campaign performance informs media spend. MFA sites deliver on superficial campaign goals, ingeniously engineered to “game” buyer KPIs. DSP campaign goals set too high viewability? DSP will bid on sites with intrusively positioned ads that refresh every 15-30 seconds. High completion rates? DSP will bid on sites stuffed with muted auto-play outstream video. High CTR and low CPC? DSP will bid on cheap, high-click volume inventory. The bottom line is that MFA sites are highly performant based on upper and lower-funnel KPIs, and platform algorithms will prioritize ads that exceed campaign objectives.

As a result, this may disincentivize buyers to monitor and remove MFA inventory from programmatic ad buys.

AB: Lotame’s approach to curated marketplaces (PMPs) involves aligning 1st party or 3rd party audience data with publisher datasets. Could you elaborate on how this alignment is achieved and its impact on targeted advertising?

EH: Lotame Curate includes both custom-built behavioral and demographic audiences and machine-learning-driven, predictive, contextual audiences paired with select inventory from leading premium supply sources, which interoperate with Lotame’s cookieless Panorama ID to achieve higher match rates and unlock incremental reach, compared with open marketplace buys. Our curated PMPs are optimized using supply-side signals to deliver improved campaign performance. 

AB: How does Lotame’s Spherical Platform solve the MFA problem that brands are facing? 

EH: We select inventory from leading premium supply sources, including MFA detection and filtration, and actively manage block and allow lists to ensure quality inventory controls. We also give preference to publishers with Lotame Panorama ID-enabled via PreBid or ad server to ensure maximum scale of addressability.

Lotame hand-selects inventory across multiple premium exchanges and integrates first- and third-party data from trusted providers into its curated packages. Why is data curation important especially in the current state of the industry?

EH: Curation unlocks data targeting upstream from the DSP, which adds privacy safeguards to programmatic buying and removes the need to map or send user IDs up and down the ad supply chain, including the open bid stream. Instead, audiences are matched to traffic using publisher first-party signals and sent to the DSP on Deal IDs, removing the audience and traffic matching burden off DSPs relying heavily on cookies and legacy identifiers. 

AB: How does Lotame collaborate with brands and SSPs to enable data and deal curation within its curated solutions?

EH: Lotame typically works with brands and agencies to understand campaign goals and business objectives and builds customized addressability programs that include audience data and curated inventory across scaled supply partners. Once the campaign is live, Lotame strategically and continuously optimizes buyers’ desired outcomes using SSP reporting and metrics.

AB: Can you provide examples of successful collaborations between Lotame and brands and SSPs that have resulted in effective data and deal curation?

EH: One example is our collaboration with advertiser Banana Boat (Xaxis = buyer) and Pubmatic to unlock incremental reach in cookieless browsers (Safari) and achieve above-benchmark performance on viewability and video completion rates.

AB: Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in the evolution of curated marketplaces, and how is Lotame positioning itself to stay at the forefront of these developments?

EH: Direct SSP and publishers’ relationships with buyers will likely expand as the drive towards transparency and sustainability increases, and Lotame hopes to serve as a central hub to facilitate connections and bridge gaps in solving for addressability at scale. 

The post How Data Curation Cures Publishers’ MFA Sickness: Q&A with Eli Heath, Head of Identity at Lotame appeared first on AdMonsters.

After Google started the initial third-party cookie deprecation process earlier this year, implementing tracking protection for 30 million Chrome users (about 1% of its user base), and the ad tech industry began testing targeting cookieless audiences, there was a large industry sentiment that we were not quite ready for Chrome’s cookie deprecation. Well, it’s looking like maybe we weren’t. 

Even before Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) release their quarterly report in April, updating the ecosystem about the latest status of Privacy Sandbox, the tech giant announced that Chrome’s apocalyptic cookie rapture would not complete by the second half of Q4, as earlier proposed.

Providing context for the delay Google wrote an official statement on the Privacy Sandbox site:

“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem.” It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.” 

Many in the industry called it, some even believing that a complete cookie cutoff will never come.  We reached out to some ad tech thought leaders for their points of view about what this means for the future of the third-party cookie and the ad tech ecosystem overall. Here’s what they had to say…

The Ad Tech Industry’s Initial Reactions

I’m sure some were banking on Google’s cookie deprecation plans coming through by the end of this year, but many saw the writing on Chrome’s walls long before this announcement. Still, giving publishers and advertisers more time to test post-cookie and privacy-centric solutions is a good thing. 

“Google’s new timeline helps the industry continue to test and adapt. Beyond even cookies, non-addressable inventory will only increase and the industry should act now to prepare for these changes. Either way, Yahoo is ready to support advertisers today, with solutions for addressable and non-addressable environments, as well as testing in the Privacy Sandbox.” – Adam Roodman, SVP of Product Strategy & Management, Yahoo

“Google will never be able to deprecate third-party cookies and still gather the enormous amounts of data that it has. Google’s core business is built on knowing and targeting known users across its systems and properties.  

I’ve said at every turn that third-party cookies would not be deprecated anytime soon with the CMA involved.” – Terry Guyton-Bradley, Senior Director of Advertising Technology, Fortune

“Kudos to the CMA for holding Google accountable and ensuring that Google’s approach is very thoughtful to publishers, especially when compared to Apple. Google has delayed the rollout of its cookie deprecation plan because it is thoughtful and has made good faith efforts to balance its corporate public-facing positioning with serving the Publishers and Brands who rely on Google’s ecosystem to survive. 

This stands in stark contrast to Apple, who are cynically painting Publishers who rely on advertising dollars as villains so they can drive audiences to Apple owned platforms. When Apple shut off third-party cookies on Safari, Publisher web CPMs dropped by 77%. When Apple shut off IDFA, Publishers’ mobile inventory suffered with a 50% drop in Facebook Audience Network CPM revenue.” – Matt Keiser, Founder, and CEO, LiveIntent

“Google’s delay, once again, is not surprising, given the technical and regulatory complexities involved. Marketers should take this extra time as a cue to adapt proactively. Focusing now on technologies that analyze the digital environment rather than the consumer—like contextual and intent-based advertising—will prepare them for a future where consumer privacy is paramount. As the industry evolves, adopting these privacy-compliant and contextually relevant approaches will meet regulatory standards and enhance digital engagement’s effectiveness.” – Uri Lichter, CEO Intango

“When Google announced the one percent depreciation earlier this year, they were testing the waters to see how much disruption would occur. Advertisers are still not prepared for a cookieless world, and it is the right move by the CMA to further interrogate a disruptive advertising move where currently only one entity, Google, stands to gain.” – Obele Brown-West, President, Tracer

“Google’s announcement on cookies wasn’t entirely unexpected, but the timing did raise some eyebrows. While cookie deprecation is inevitable for privacy reasons, finding a suitable alternative is crucial to maintaining effective targeting. Marketers are hopeful for a solution that respects user privacy without sacrificing precision in messaging. It’s a reminder of the ongoing evolution in digital marketing strategies.” – Chris Coomer, VP of Data, Analytics & Insights, NP Digital

“My initial reaction, and continued sentiment, is that this is a great setback for publisher innovation. Too many organizations require C-suite buy-in to invest in authentication and alt-IDs, and if those players are sated by the delay of cookie deprecation and are comforted by the knowledge that third-party cookies will still help their Chrome revenues through Q4, I think that all forward progress gets paused once again. 

Chrome will for sure deprecate the third-party cookie, just as they will further obfuscate IP addresses and device IDs in time.”  – Justin Wohl, Chief Revenue Officer, Snopes.com

Movement For an Open Web (MOW) Questions Google’s Motives 

James Rosewell, co-founder of the MOW, commented on Google’s decision to delay its Privacy Sandbox rollout further, noting that regulatory and industry pressures compelled this move. With inquiries from the CMA, the EU, and the US DOJ scrutinizing Google’s Privacy Sandbox and market position, it was inevitable for Google to postpone such a significant change. 

Furthermore, Rosewell states that Google’s Privacy Sandbox’s ineffectiveness offers a convenient shield. Both the CMA and the IAB Tech Lab have raised concerns about its suitability. Google can acknowledge these concerns and sidestep regulatory injunctions. 

“For anyone who thinks regulation doesn’t have an impact, they’re wrong. However, both the CMA and Google are complicit in continuing the uncertainty. The CMA needs to be clear that Google can’t interfere with interoperability and that Google’s Privacy Sandbox must compete on its merits. That would solve the problems. If the CMA is reluctant, then the DMU is weeks away from becoming law, which gives them more powers. 

“Now, the industry has more time to prepare if they think Google’s plans will come to fruition. However, be mindful. Without the guarantee of interoperability, so-called alternative solutions will likely not work either. Apple has a policy regarding interference. Under data protection law, there is no difference between first and third parties. It’s all about the risk of harm. Jumping on first-party data solutions is not without risk.

“I predict that cookies will eventually go the way of the telegram. When they’re no longer used, Chrome will remove them. In the meantime, they need to remain while better solutions are advanced and adopted. In the field of privacy, there are likely to be many better solutions than those advanced by GApple. A competitive market will enable innovation and diverse solutions suited to different needs.” – James Rosewell, Founder, MOW

The Future of the Industry and Chrome’s Cookie Delay

As the news of Chrome’s cookie delay settles in, the ad tech industry is moving ahead with cookie alternative privacy-centric techniques. Whether Chrome will be going cookieless anytime soon, ad tech is forging a path forward that helps engage consumers with considerations of privacy ethics. 

“This delay presents a valuable opportunity for the industry to capitalize on existing cookied datasets while leveraging contextual or alternative identifier data. Advertisers and publishers should seize this opportunity to test solutions now while seeing the impact through A/B testing is still easy. This will help guide the new proxies and performance replacements when (not if) the cookie is gone. The race to interoperability is on, and we encourage the industry to maintain its momentum in preparation—now is not the time to take our foot off the pedal.” – Jenn Chen President and CRO, Connatix

“This is only a pause. IAB Tech Lab maintains that the 3PC will eventually disappear. We continue to advocate for a portfolio approach to addressability. This delay should not be an excuse for the digital advertising industry to be complacent. We must continue to innovate privacy-preserving addressability & measurement solutions while working with Chrome to improve upon the critical shortcomings of the Privacy Sandbox.” – Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab 

“It was very likely that a delay was going to happen, given that the larger ecosystem wasn’t ready. A lot of work is being done but it’s a long road to remake the whole digital ads ecosystem. I continue to think it’s very likely that Google will depreciate, but will be very curious to see the next UK CMA report as it will shed light on some of the biggest areas that led to the delay.” – Paul Bannister, CSO, Raptive. 

“I have been researching Privacy Sandbox for years now and am constantly learning more. I will use the extra time to better understand how the industry is using these new tools and how they perform. So many of us are grappling with Privacy Sandbox and I will continue to share my findings publicly—including an open webinar next week. 

I also know from speaking with leading companies in this space, that they face three key challenges: 1) implementing & optimizing the various Privacy Sandbox tools in practice; 2) orchestrating these tools and the feedback they provide; and 3) scaling from 1% deprecation to 100%. So, I expect these companies will make good use of this extra time.” – Garrett Johnson, Assistant Professor, Questrom School of Business, Boston University

“Most Marketers have already prepared themselves for a cookieless world, and the recent Google delay only postpones the inevitable. The vast majority of the bidstream today is already cookieless and the fastest growing channels like CTV have never supported cookies. We’re encouraging marketers to lean into their first-party data strategies, and to adopt identity solutions that break free from reliance on third-party cookies to ensure they remain competitive.” – Jon Schulz, CMO, Viant Technology

“We have always embraced contextual and content-based targeting, without the need of third-party data. Rather than having ‘will they, won’t they’ conversations, we’ve been able to take a future-proofed approach, ensuring that an ad is placed within relevant content. As a result, we’ve helped brands and agencies increase campaign impact, effectiveness and, as a result, reduce media wastage.” – Bill Schild, GM, Americas, Channel Factory

“While the industry has been buzzing about the pros and cons around Google Privacy Sandbox, I keep asking myself – ‘Isn’t the cookie just soggy at this point?’ Ad tech firms like Liveramp, TTD and Magnite have already started to plant their flag in the ground with identity-free solutions.

As the decision to delay becomes official, my only caution to our industry is that we don’t keep pushing identity down the road—much of the cookie depreciation has already occurred. Marketers who own their data and take a thoughtful approach to reaching and messaging with their customers and prospects are primed to win the biggest share of wallets.” – Lance Wolder, Head of Strategy and Marketing, PadSquad

“For marketers, the message is clear: get off cookies now. Most of the industry, including mobile and other browsers like Safari, have already moved away from cookies or never used them in the first place. Don’t wait for Google’s shifting timeline to take action; the transition should be happening now. Keep in mind that regardless of cookies, the web’s future—driven by consumer preferences and regulatory changes—is identity-less. Contextual targeting is the best way forward.” – Ken Weiner, Chief Technology Officer, GumGum.

“In the U.S., Chrome represents 50% of web traffic, and even here, we often see a 10% to 50% reduction in tracking accuracy due to cookie synchronization challenges. This means that globally, we can track less than half of web traffic using third-party cookies. 

Marketers must assess their dependency on third-party cookie technology in running ads, measure their performance, and explore alternative solutions to limit the risk of being impacted by a Google technology change likely to happen in the coming months.” – Rico Dittrich, Consulting Manager and Privacy Ambassador, fifty-five

“The roll-out of Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox is a complex endeavor with a lot of regulatory oversight, so it’s no surprise that there have been delays along the way. That said, Android’s Privacy Sandbox is progressing well, and this is a great time for marketers who advertise on mobile to get familiar with a world without device identifiers. They can begin early testing of the Privacy Sandbox by starting integration tests, testing the APIs, and providing feedback, which can greatly help influence Google’s designs and roadmaps.” – Katie Madding, Chief Product Officer, Adjust

“Google has historically solved issues within their own four walls attempting to deprecate third-party cookies with the promise to offer alternative solutions warrants collaboration. After initial reluctance, the AdTech industry has proposed multiple solutions to the issues that plague Privacy Sandbox, Google should consider altering their own opinions in order to meet the promise they made to the CMA.

Neither the sell-side and buy-side of the industry should deviate from testing and improving the solutions offered for a cookieless browser environment, no matter the change in timeline from the Privacy Sandbox team. The largest threat to the digital advertising ecosystem is the stagnation of innovation and having an entire industry consumed by the depreciation of the third-party cookie is threatening to do just that.” — Amanda Martin, SVP, Monetization & Business Strategy, Mediavine

“Anyone expecting Google—or any other big tech platform—to help end the era of measurement, privacy, and marketing malpractice that third-party cookies underpin must open their eyes to the broader trajectory of where this has been and where this is going. There was once a time when the third-party cookie added economic value that far outweighed the risks it created. In 2024, third-party cookies are only making a few companies a lot of money: the companies that set the cookies (Google, Facebook, etc.). 

Brands lose up to $29 per customer acquired online because their acquisition strategies rely on third-party cookie-based audiences. These audiences are now over-saturated, leaving a smaller and smaller pool of users under-exposed to any individual brand message, all while the cost of showing these ads is higher than ever. 

So, what will end the third-party cookie? Simple, when someone figures out how to make advertisers more money without them.” — Matt Butler, the CEO and co-founder of Bonsai Data Solutions

The post 20 Ad Tech Industry Experts Weigh In On Google’s Third Party Cookie Deprecation Delay appeared first on AdMonsters.

To say that Reddit’s IPO is causing a stir is an understatement. As of this writing, the IPO is four and five times oversubscribed, meaning more people want shares than the 22 million it will likely issue.

Part of that excitement is due to generative AI. Google and other AI companies are just itching to get their hands on Reddit’s vast pool of user-generated content to train its models, and the company believes selling it can bring in $203 million in just a few years.  

But, on March 14th, Reddit received a letter from the FTC raising questions in a non-public inquiry about its plans to sell, license, and share all that UGC to third parties looking to train their AI models. 

In a regulatory filing, Reddit said the filing is a real bummer: “Regulatory engagements can be lengthy and unpredictable. Any regulatory engagement may cause us to incur substantial costs, and it is possible for any regulatory engagement to result in reputational harm or fines, cause us to discontinue or modify our products, services, features, or functionalities, require us to change our policies or practices, divert management and other resources from our business, or otherwise adversely impact our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.”

Some Reddit users are unhappy with the plan to sell their UCG and are worried about a loss of privacy. Others aren’t keen to miss out on an opportunity to earn money from their years of posting. 

AI models need tons of data to be trained accurately, and Reddit’s 17 billion posts written in natural language fit the bill. As a platform and not a publisher, does Reddit have the right to sell that content?

A Different Category Than Publishers

The publishing industry has been fighting this battle since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. 

OpenAI has been making deals with publishers to license their content for training purposes, paying up to $5 million a year. Big publishers, such as Alex Springer, have signed on.

For some in the publishing industry, generative AI is a reality they need to live with, and licensing fees may be a way to get back some of the revenue they’ll lose due to Google SGE, which some call an extinction-level event for media.

At AdMonsters’s Publisher Forum, keynote speaker Burhan Hamid, CTO at Time, shared that licensing fees may provide a revenue stream for publishers. However, he sees other ways for publishers to seize the opportunities of AI before their competitors beat them to it. 

Still, publishers pay their journalists and writers for the content they publish, which means they own it. If they’re okay with licensing it to AI companies for training, at least everyone in the equation gets paid for their efforts. This is not the case with Reddit, Meta, and many other examples.

Training AI on People Data isn’t New

In January 2020, the New York Times ran a story on Clearview AI, a company that “devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared.” 

According to the Times, Clearview began with a database of 3 billion photos, all of which it scraped from Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo alongside “a million other sites.” (Today, Clearview.ai claims to have an astounding 30 billion photos that train its AI.)

In January 2019, IBM announced “a new large and diverse dataset called Diversity in Faces (DiF) to advance the study of fairness and accuracy in facial recognition technology.” The dataset relied on “publicly available images from the YFCC-100M Creative Commons data set,” which the company annotated using “10 well-established and independent coding schemes from the scientific literature.” 

So what is the YFCC-100M Creative Commons data set exactly? It turns out it’s 99.2 million photos and .8 million videos that Flickr users uploaded over a 10-year period, which Yahoo pilfered from the platform (the YF in the name of the dataset stands for Yahoo Flickr). Yahoo snagged more than just photos, of course. Metadata in the dataset include title, description, tags, geo-tag, uploader information, capture device information, URL to the original item.” Does metadata include PII data if, say, Flickr users title their photos with their names?

More recently, Meta announced Meta AI, a chatbot and image generator they trained on posts and images shared by Facebook and Instagram users. Those users may not like that Meta used images of their nieces or grandbabies to train an AI image generator, but that horse has already left the barn.

The Market to The Rescue?

Congress has made it clear that it believes publishers should be compensated when AI is trained on their content, and the courts may back this up if the New York Times prevails in its suit against OpenAI. Some of the privacy laws, as well as the Biden Administration’s AI Bill of Rights, will help protect the everyday citizen’s privacy, but nothing addresses the IP of our content.

But there may be one saving grace: the market may reject AI generated on UGC. We’re already seeing a healthy skepticism for AI-generated content. Jared Sawdoski has coined the term Habsburg AI, which he defines as “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”

Plenty of examples of grotesque content and art generated by AI get passed on to the consumer. Last summer, the New York Times reported that truly awful AI-generated travel guides were flooding Amazon. The Atlantic reported that AI-generated “junk” is being passed as unique art on Etsy. The AI companies may eventually conclude that training their models on Facebook rants of Aunt Betsy and Uncle Joey results in garbage and cease to buy that data.

One thing is clear, however: Answering who owns the training data and how those owners should be compensated is a thorny issue that will take years to resolve. In the meantime, everyone should assume that AI models are using all content. Period.

The post Answering Who Owns the Data AI is Trained On? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Big changes are happening in the ad tech industry. The rollout of Google Privacy Sandbox has been contentious at best, what with the CMA’s various concerns, the Movement for an Open Web calling out the Sandbox for failing to serve as a third-party cookie replacement, and the IAB’s report citing the industry’s lack of readiness due to implementation challenges driven by limitations in achieving key advertising objectives.

Even without the raising of all these red flags, the advertising ecosystem must still find other ways to target consumers in a privacy-safe way. There will be no one solution, and to be successful at capturing users going forward, publishers will need to use a mix of solutions, including alternative IDs (alt IDs). 

Adaptation to privacy regulations will be crucial to the industry’s success going forward. In the days of third-party cookies running amok, publishers could receive optimal functionality without actively participating in the back end. Now the dynamics are changing, presenting publishers with an infrastructure challenge.

The good news is that alt IDs replicate a seamless experience for all parties in the ecosystem and offer the industry one common language to rely on.

The problem? We are all using different alt IDs. 

What Does it Mean to be Alt ID Agnostic?

As of the last time we counted, there are as many as 100 different alt ID solutions available, so how can a publisher choose which to use? Many aren’t choosing at all or are choosing them all by throwing their hat into every available bucket – this is what we mean by alt-ID agnostic. 

“At lockr, we view this as publishers entering this new era and not knowing who to turn to,” shares Keith Petri, Founder and CEO of lockr. Investing in each different alt ID requires data, he says, and the demand side hasn’t picked a clear winner and likely won’t. “As a result of this, the next four quarters for integrations for publishers looks like a LUMAscape of ID solutions,” he says.

The biggest problem, according to Petri, is that the plethora of alt ID options leads to a paradox of choice, where people either become unable to make any choice at all, or they decide to invest in many alt IDs, which leads to bid stuffing and increases data leakage. 

The biggest problem, according to Petri, is that the plethora of alt ID options leads to a paradox of choice, where people either become unable to make any choice at all, or they decide to invest in many alt IDs, which leads to bid stuffing and increases data leakage. 

There are solutions to help mitigate this problem, such as lockr’s Alternative Identity Manager (AIM), a self-service identity solution that allows publishers to test identity solutions, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), and clean rooms simultaneously.

With AIM you can test alt IDs in real time, toggling each one on or off to see the results each alt ID is getting for consent, registration, or number of IDs created. This can help publishers see how each alt ID is working. 

Ray Kingman, CEO and founder of Semcasting says the most important thing right now in trying to solve the alt ID problem is not to recreate the cookie problem.

He notes that alt IDs don’t identify a person by any information that pinpoints who they are, they simply communicate that a user is unique, which protects user privacy. “You don’t want a universal ID that is specific to one user that is redistributed to third parties, that is what created the problem in the first place,” Kingman adds.

The goal, according to Kingman, should be to ensure we are being good stewards of our customers and the data that has been entrusted to us. Semcasting does this by being alt ID agnostic differently – its data and identity solutions are designed to be able to accept almost any ID.

“The issue with being alt ID agnostic is that it bifurcates the industry so the open internet is no longer open. Our solution to that was to be a meta ID, meaning it doesn’t matter what you throw at us.”

Being Alt ID Agnostic is Detrimental to Publishers

Publishers are being inundated with multiple alt ID choices and many are finding it hard to navigate which alt IDs are the best for their business. Conflicting feedback from advertisers coupled with the lack of available metrics about what is working makes it difficult to decide which IDs to prioritize. 

Additionally, says Petri, “The prevalence of players claiming to be ‘identity agnostic’ has further complicated matters, leaving publishers without clear guidance on how to navigate the evolving landscape of digital advertising. As a result, publishers risk missing out on revenue opportunities and facing operational inefficiencies due to the lack of alignment with advertiser preferences and the inability to accurately measure advertising impact.” 

There are too many hurdles preventing publishers from being able to dip their toes into the alt ID space rather than fully committing to a course of action. According to Petri, these include: 

1. Initial integration requires full commitment: Publishers can’t test alt IDs incrementally; they must invest upfront in integration without the luxury of a lighter test integration.
2. Difficulty in measuring impact: Without the removal of third-party cookies and the ability to replicate bid requests with different alt IDs, assessing effectiveness is next to impossible.
3. Time constraints and competing priorities: Publishers struggle to evaluate and integrate alt IDs within limited timeframes, exacerbated by delays in cookie deprecation and competing priorities.
4. Risk of signaling inferiority: Adopting multiple alt IDs suggests that each serves unique needs, preventing the signaling of one as inferior, but complicating the integration process.

Forging a Path Forward in a Cookieless World

Looking to the future, solutions that prioritize first-party data will almost certainly win the day. Change is difficult for anyone, but it is important to remember ad tech thrives with change. The trap is in trying to make the new solutions behave the same as the old. 

Keeping in mind the tendency to lean into new ways that replicate legacy programs, Petri shares, “Privacy Sandbox, despite facing skepticism, presents an opportunity to embrace a new, less defined approach, fostering a more user-focused internet while acknowledging its constraints and potential for innovation.”

The past included a sea of universal IDs that weren’t universal at all, but were created as exclusive spaces for the big players to use, Kingman says.

The past included a sea of universal IDs that weren’t universal at all, but were created as exclusive spaces for the big players to use, Kingman says.

Going forward, he notes, “Instead of building these walled gardens that do nothing but bifurcate the industry into those who have and those who have not, we need to make the ID space fluid.

Keeping it fluid makes it unable to be abused in a lot of ways because as you’re tracking somebody the fear is that your IDs get redistributed in a manner that you don’t intend on but can’t control. It becomes open season for those with less stringent regulatory compliance requirements.”

We must build trust and relationships with users via transparency, says Petri, and focus on authenticated users because consent-based data is usable data. “Publishers should communicate clearly with readers about the benefits of authentication, fostering trust and enabling sustainable revenue models. By embracing strategic and creative approaches to authentication, publishers can navigate the evolving landscape successfully and unlock new growth opportunities,” he shares. 

Using first-party data ensures you are reaching more users, adds Kingman. In terms of numbers, he notes third-party data may reach 30% of your subscribers, but first-party data reaches more like 80% thanks to the additional touchpoints it provides. 

Leading the Charge: What are the Next Steps?

Petri notes publishers have a pivotal role to play in the effective implementation of alt IDs. In addition to building trust, they also need to collaborate with alt ID providers to communicate audience data to ensure continued efficiency in audience targeting. 

“Publishers also have an opportunity to address the historical data leakage caused by third-party cookies. Implementing strategies such as utilizing Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to curate audience-driven buys or leveraging industry-leading data clean rooms for direct matches with advertiser audiences can help mitigate these risks and foster stronger, more secure partnerships throughout the ecosystem,” Petri says. 

On the buy side, Kingman says the industry should do what it does best – test. Rather than get stuck in a solution that doesn’t work to its full potential, testing can ensure you know what kind of results to expect. He predicts the solution will likely include using more than one ID.

The post What are the Best Practices for Using Alternative IDs? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Last week, the IAB Tech Lab released a comprehensive report detailing the challenges of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. 

IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur stated that the Privacy Sandbox analysis report indicates the industry’s lack of readiness and identifies multiple hurdles to implementation due to limitations in achieving key advertising objectives. 

But it’s not like the Big G to stay quiet when industry stakeholders call them out, and understandably so. In response, Google thanked the IAB Tech Lab for showcasing their perspective but asserted that their “analysis contains many misunderstandings and inaccuracies, which we consider important to correct in order to provide accurate information to the ecosystem.” 

The IAB Tech Lab’s Concerns 

As the IAB Tech Lab mentions, embracing Google’s Privacy Sandbox marks a tremendous evolution in the advertising industry, diverging from the industry’s trajectory of the past 25 years. Yet, the advertising tech and standards organization believes the industry needs more time to prepare for these changes. From their point of view, Chrome prioritizes discrete components to support different use cases. Still, the IAB has reservations that Chrome can combine these components into a cohesive framework that offers a sustainable business foundation. 

The analysis revealed several key issues highlighting the challenges media companies, advertisers, and the broader industry face in adapting to Privacy Sandbox-mandated changes. For instance:

• Essential Event-Based Metrics: Temporary support for essential event-based impression and click counting is followed by a shift to aggregated reporting, hindering bid loss analysis and complicating revenue reconciliation and troubleshooting.
• Brand Safety Concerns: The new landscape introduces brand safety concerns, requiring advertisers to address potential threats to advertisement integrity and ensure alignment with desired contexts and values.
• On-Browser Computing Implications: Google’s integration of an ad exchange and server within the Chrome browser necessitates significant re-tooling of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, impacting addressability, reporting mechanisms, ad rendering processes, bidding decisioning capabilities, and scalability challenges for the Privacy Sandbox.
• Lack of Consideration for Commercial Requirements: Chrome’s active role in financial transactions and ad delivery raises concerns about Privacy Sandbox overlooking legal and business requirements, potentially leading to legal penalties and loss of trust from customers and partners.

Google’s Rebuttal

While Google pointed out the alleged inaccuracies of the IAB Tech Lab’s report, their primary concern was that the report overlooked the main goal of Privacy Sandbox, which is to improve user privacy while still backing efficient digital advertising. 

Google created Privacy Sandbox APIs to support business objectives while safeguarding user privacy. Big G did not intend to directly replace third-party cookies or cross-site identifiers, despite potential misconceptions.  As highlighted in the tech company’s press release, “to enhance user privacy effectively, recreating every current marketing tactic isn’t feasible, but adapting existing methods and innovating new ones can address business goals.” Although Google warns that this shift requires investment, effort, and collaboration, it’s both necessary and achievable.

Some industry stakeholders agree. “Beyond constructive criticism, it’s important to highlight that even though the Privacy Sandbox APIs may not provide a direct replacement for third-party cookies and mobile ad IDs, that should not be the ultimate goal. Instead, ensuring that the technology enables fair competition should be the priority for industry groups and regulators alike,” said Bosko Milekic, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Optable.

The more in-depth Privacy Sandbox’s response to IAB Tech Lab’s analysis focuses on the Technical Assessment section, offering detailed commentary and clarifications across five programmatic advertising categories: Audience Management, Auction Dynamics, Creative Delivery and Rendering, Reporting, and Interoperability. 

The Inaccuracies

The Privacy Sandbox APIs support correcting assumptions or filling gaps in use cases. For instance, the claim in the report about the “Loss of Runtime Data for Brand Safety” is incorrect, according to Google. Unlike current practices, buyers still receive the page URL in ad requests. Moreover, during a Protected Audience auction, they can cross-check the seller-declared URL with the browser-declared URL for an additional brand safety measure. 

Specific use cases, like the assertion that “Interest Groups do not span across devices,” are not covered by third-party cookies, just as the Privacy Sandbox does not cover them. Proposals suggesting methods that could revive cross-site tracking and conflict with privacy objectives, such as the request for passing buyers’ signals to generate identifiable reports, are not aligned with privacy goals. 

Moreover, certain functionalities like “Look-alike modeling” may not be directly supported, but alternative approaches can fulfill similar objectives. For example, leveraging the Private Aggregation API to understand the aggregate behavior of a seed audience can serve the purpose effectively.

Despite both sides taking out their gloves, Chrome is welcoming additional feedback from the IAB and the industry at large to help improve Topics APIs. 

You can read the full report here.

The post Google Responds to the IAB Tech Lab’s Scathing Privacy Sandbox Report: “It’s Full of Inaccuracies” appeared first on AdMonsters.

You probably heard that the IAB Tech Lab issued a report expressing significant concerns about Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

The task force found that most use cases are “explicitly not supported or have been degraded to the point of being untenable.” Among those use cases are bread-and-butter topics for successful campaigns, like frequency capping and attribution (something the IAB calls essential event-based metrics).

This is no small problem for advertisers who want to pay the right price for inventory-driven outcomes and publishers who want to earn the CPMs their inventory and audiences warrant. But as the report warns, “Essential event-based impression and click counting are only temporarily supported, later moving to aggregated reporting. Bid loss analysis is impossible, making revenue reconciliation and troubleshooting extremely difficult.”

To some in the industry, such as Uri Lichter, CEO at Intango, the problem is that the notion of third-party cookies is too broad. The industry needs to come together to develop a new class of cookies that help the advertising business function properly and ones that browsers don’t ban.

What Irked Consumers About Cookies

It’s hard not to take the consumer’s side in many privacy discussions. I remember signing on to my healthcare portal to check on something and seeing a Facebook ad a few minutes later that said something like, “This dentist is available in your network and area.” It was creepy.

Our data was (and likely still is) widely available for sale. It felt like every click was captured, packaged into an audience segment, and sold to anyone who wanted it. This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.

But there’s a difference between surveillance and optimizing the ad experience. One can argue that consumers aren’t opposed to things like frequency capping — who wants to see the same ad repeatedly?– or attribution. Most would even support attribution if they understood that their favorite publications benefited from it. I love gardening and want to see ads for Gardener’s Supply. If I purchase from them (and I have frequently), I want to know when the new shipments of perennials come in when I’m reading the news in the morning.

How companies use third-party cookies makes a big difference. Third-party companies that capture data without the consumer’s knowledge are irksome, especially when one considers how much money those companies have made from those data sales. 

Designating Cookies Based on Use Case, Not Who Places Them

But are those third-party cookies in the same league as cookies that help publishers track revenue or media agencies apply frequency capping? 

“Publishers may use a tracking cookie, but it’s deployed by a service provider as the publisher didn’t have the tech infrastructure to do it themselves; in which case, would it be considered first or third party? There’s a case to be made that they’re not in the same league,” Uri said in an interview.

In other words, the cookie’s purpose is more relevant than the entity that places it (after all, the policy regulations require brands and publishers to conduct due diligence on their vendors to ensure they’re using all consumer data appropriately).

Advertisers also often rely on third-party cookies for tracking revenue and attribution. Understanding how companies use these cookies and distinguishing between first-party and third-party sources is crucial. This knowledge helps in identifying any potential issues and finding suitable solutions.

“Everyone understands first-party cookies, but Google is categorically sweeping several cookies under the “third-party” umbrella, and this isn’t necessarily the right thing to do,” Lichter said. This kind of umbrella designation of “all third-party cookies bad” is hurting the industry.

Lichter suggests developing a new type of cookie that is distinguished from the cookies that are being deprecated, although he isn’t sure what such a cookie would look like at this moment. He’d like to see the industry come together to hammer it out.

There may be some wiggle room in the regulations themselves. GDPR has a legitimate interest article, and one can argue that attribution, measurement, and applying criteria like frequency capping are required for a successful industry.

It’s in everyone’s best interest to get to a state where companies can track users for attribution to determine where advertisers can understand where to spend, which is ideal but not possible yet.

The post Digital Advertising Needs a New Class of Cookies appeared first on AdMonsters.