More than two years ago, Google fired the starting gun in the ad industry’s race towards a cookieless future. While some progress has been made in advance of the impending sea change in digital targeting, measurement and attribution, a clear picture remains out of focus due to the proliferation of alternative identifiers and ongoing changes to Google’s timeline and privacy proposals. But there are still steps marketers can and should be taking now to get ready.
Industry trade groups have sounded the alarm about the cost of not properly preparing for the future of targeting and measurement. Up to $10 billion of annual sell-side revenue is in jeopardy, according to February’s State of Data report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which warned of a “measurement blackout” if the industry doesn’t act soon. With that in mind, there are some encouraging signs that the ad industry is getting its house in order, with many advertisers calling the preparation for a cookieless future a top priority for the rest of the year and some already beginning to shift tactics and budgets away from third-party cookies and towards first-party data and other tactics.
Yet amid these stark warnings and shifts in advertiser priorities, it is still unclear how the deprecation of third-party cookies — alongside privacy regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and changes to several key mobile identifiers — will affect the ad industry and how it will react, even as Google’s latest privacy proposal enters small-scale testing, mostly by ad-tech companies.
“Most brands and agencies are still not familiar with the various components of Privacy Sandbox,” said Angelina Eng, vice president of measurement and attribution at IAB. “It’s a little bit frustrating that these tech companies aren’t sitting down with their advertisers and saying, ‘What’s important to you? What’s not important to you? What are your tolerance levels in terms of these findings?’”
Esewi Ogbebor 1 y
Hmmm