Google called the future of Unified ID 2.0 into question, without directly naming it, by clearly stating that it has no plans to support email-based identifiers or any mechanism that it views as mirroring the functionality of cookies.
For Google, it’s Privacy Sandbox or bust, at least when it comes to the open web. (Google’s own first-party products and services are an entirely different story.)
Regardless of Google’s opinion on the matter, however, the industry soldiers on, including The Trade Desk (which spearheaded Unified ID 2.0 as an open source industry initiative), the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (which is currently reviewing the UID 2.0 code) and the IAB Tech Lab (which is in the mist of hammering out the Project Rearc principles that will underpin UID 2.0).
Open questions
But there are other challenges facing Unified ID 2.0, putting aside Google’s rebuke and its prediction that email identifiers “aren’t a sustainable long-term investment” due to consumer expectations for privacy and the rapidly evolving regulatory environment.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery.
There’s been a great deal of hand-wringing over the future of identity in digital advertising. Google Chrome’s plan to retire third-party cookies and Apple’s move to make IDFAs opt-in have kicked off what, to many, feels like a crisis for digital advertising.
Google’s recent announcement that it won’t provide alternate user-level identifiers is just the latest indication that we are well within an inexorable shift towards an opt-in world. This world is one where the only industry-accepted (and, in increasingly many jurisdictions, legally-accepted) means of addressable digital targeting is through an ID which the user has explicitly opted-in to using.
To be clear, there will be alternate user-level identifiers, just not built or used by Google. That horse race is well underway and will continue, unaffected by this news from Google. But new identifiers are not going to solve the ad world’s problems. Google’s announcement confirms that we won’t see one built into Chrome, and without the penetration provided by being default-on in a major browser, no new identifier will fill the hole left by cookies.
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"The Sell Sider" is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Benjamin Blank, chief executive officer of UPROXX.
The world of publishing learned how to be nimble in times of turbulence during 2020.
While some evolution was expected (particularly in the digital realm), the obvious shakeup stemming from COVID-19 meant publishers adapted to changing consumption behavior and content needs—and quickly. Major digital publishers teamed up to create an opportunity to drive broader footprints across the digital ecosystem.
When we zoom out, the importance of a strategic and diversified revenue portfolio to ensure robust ad offerings—no matter the circumstance—has become a shared priority for the digital community. It’s important for business revenue to come in from a multitude of areas to really ensure your portfolio is diverse (i.e. social channels, editorial verticals, current partnerships, new partnerships, etc.).
If publishers diversify audiences and platforms, they will naturally build presences in places where audiences are moving. For example, when CPMs decreased on the web from 2015 to 2018, publishers who only focused on display impressions struggled because audiences were also consuming on newer content platforms, like Facebook and Instagram.
Today, audiences are migrating again. In 2020, one-fifth of the US population became a TikTok user, according to eMarketer. In a world where content consumption is ever-changing, first you have to find where your audience is moving to/actually is, and from there you can serve the larger ad community with confidence.
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Big Critic
Tim Wu, a leading critic of big tech who coined the term “net neutrality,” is joining the White House in yet another sign that President Joe Biden is taking a hard look at the way large technology firms operate and wield their power. Wu, a Columbia University law professor who has long called for stronger enforcement of antitrust laws, was named to the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. According to The New York Times, Wu’s primary focus will be on competition policy at a time when tech companies are pushing back against new antitrust laws. Wu has loudly warned about the consequences of too much power being concentrated among only a few companies (wink, wink Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple). In Wu’s view, the nation’s economy has begun to strike an uncanny resemblance to the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. “Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership,” Wu wrote in his 2018 book, “The Curse of Bigness.” Read on.
Emerging Rival
Google is a dominant force in the online advertising industry, but there’s one company that could give GOOG a run for its money: The Trade Desk. The Wall Street Journal reports that the buy-side platform is eating into Google’s slice of the ad market – and it’s share is actually growing faster than Google’s, albeit from a far lower base. If The Trade Desk keeps its momentum going, it’s poised to emerge as the most viable challenger to Google. TTD has made inroads by investing in parts of the online advertising segments, such as audio and streaming TV, where Google hasn’t already cornered the market. The COVID-19 pandemic also boosted The Trade Desk’s business as homebound Americans consumed more digital media. Still, The Trade Desk has its work cut out – and the company has no illusions about how difficult it is to take on a powerhouse. Google also has the ability to dominate the conversation with a single blog post, as it did last week when it said it didn’t approve of email-based cookie replacements. TTD’s stock fell nearly 13% on that piece of news. But The Trade Desk’s CEO, Jeff Green, remains optimistic about building an alternative targeting solution to rival Google’s approach. [Related in AdExchanger: “What Google Is – And Isn’t Saying – When It Says It Won’t Build Alternative IDs After The Death Of Third-Party Cookies”]
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Google isn’t a fan of using email-based identifiers as a replacement for third-party cookies.
“We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long-term investment,” Google’s director of product management for ads privacy and trust, David Temkin, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The post also included Google’s pledge not to use or create its own alternate identifiers for web tracking when third-party cookies go away.
But it appears that there’s some wiggle room.
According to Travis Clinger, LiveRamp’s SVP of addressability and ecosystem, although Google won’t support IdentityLink and publisher IDs created through Authenticated Traffic Solution for open marketplace buys, DV360 will continue to recognize these IDs for private marketplace deals across Index Exchange, Magnite, OpenX, PubMatic and other SSPs.
“That tells me Google is essentially bifurcating its decision, because marketers can still buy people-based inventory on DV360 using LiveRamp,” said Bob Perkins, COO of identity verification company BritePool. “Regulators might change, consumer sentiment might change – but it seems like Google is going to continue on until that happens.”
The water is a bit muddy. And so we asked the experts: Are Google’s recent statements about email-based IDs a net positive, negative or neutral for email-based online identity going forward? Opinions were … varied.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Alex Chatfield, VP of marketplace development at Xandr.
A major challenge for buyers in the new and quickly growing video/CTV landscape is reaching consumers at scale. Unlike the programmatic display ecosystem, the premium video marketplace is fragmented across inventory owners (due to carriage agreements) and almost entirely deal-gated, or in other words, not available on the open exchange.
While there are a number of other hurdles, access to inventory is at the top of the list.
This inaccessibility may come as a surprise due to the influx of premium video and CTV content we’re gaining access to as consumers. However, the complexity of the path to premium video content, as well as the sheer number of paths, can be daunting and enormously time consuming for buyers.
In order to fully address this burgeoning opportunity, buyers must be cognizant of when, where and how they are reaching consumers. Taking the following steps will help remove friction and inefficiencies in the premium video marketplace, ultimately ensuring that buyers reach valuable audiences in premium environments at scale.
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There's a growing need for marketers to unify their ad buying across social, mobile app, CTV and other digital channels. Luckily that dream is moving closer to reality, as these channels are increasingly addressable.
Less luckily, measurement is backsliding in this converged buying modality as the industry finally puts privacy ahead of profit and clamps down on the kind of data wildcatting that defined the first 25 years of internet advertising. This is a positive trend overall, but it endangers the whole prospect of cross-channel analytics, reach & frequency management and optimization. The silos are breaking down, but marketers are still flying blind.
In this episode, Tinuiti SVP of addressable media Kolin Kleveno describes the opportunity and pain of managing programmatic across channels.
“I’m not losing sleep over being able to target. There’s going to be so many different solutions, from Google FLoC in the privacy sandbox to Unified ID 2.0 to tried and true contextual placements,” he says. “It’s more around the measurement. That is where it gives me anxiety. There’s just so much. What will be tracked? For how long? Is it easy to extract that? Can you move that into a clean room? Can clients have their own clean room?”
To overcome the uncertainty, he recommends that advertisers set up rigorous test-and-learn agendas – and make hay while the sun shines.
“When we have the data coming in from cookies and IDFAs for maybe another month, we can start benchmarking performance and then build out those proxies for when the data ceases to exist or be at our fingertips,” he says.
"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Martin Kihn, senior vice president of marketing strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Considering the future of post-cookie ad data management, a dominant scenario goes like this:
- Brands gather more first-party data from customers, with their consent.
- Publishers (including gardens) accept personally identifiable information (PII)-based audiences and match as they can.
- “Clean rooms” are used to prevent data leakage.
- A handful of Universal IDs emerge, based on PII like emails and stored on first-party cookies, to allow broader activation on participating sites and apps.
- The browsers – or at least Chrome – adopts an aggregate targeting and measurement mechanism with an avian name.
In this scenario, the email (appropriately hashed) emerges as a key bridge from cookies to the future. Large publishers offer Facebook Custom Audience-like buying. And for the rest of the world, Google assures us that FLoCs are "95% as effective as cookies."
So really – other than losing what Safari engineer John Wilander calls an "arbitrary cross-site tracking vector," – advertisers can look forward to something like business as usual.
Until we start to think about the logistics.
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Bite Of The Apple
Another day, another platform, another investigation. This time, Apple is under scrutiny by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s antitrust regulator, over whether Apple “imposes unfair or anticompetitive conditions on app developers.” According to The Wall Street Journal, the investigation started after developers complained about Apple’s rules, such as requiring that all apps on iPhone and iPad devices must be distributed through Apple’s App Store. “At the core of the antitrust concerns is how much control and share of revenue technology giants should have in relation to popular apps,” the WSJ writes. Apple says it will work with the CMA and claims that its requirements for submitting apps are fair and also necessary in order to prevent malware and “rampant data collection without consent.” Relatedly, the EU had already started poking into Apple’s App Store policies last June, and there is definitely overlap between the two cases. Both complaints are meritless – in Apple’s view, of course.
Ban Lifted
With a new president in office, the elections over and the dust settling after January’s attack on the US Capitol, the coast appears clear for Facebook to lift its ban on political advertising. Starting Thursday, advertisers are able to buy new ads about social issues, elections or politics, The New York Times reports. Political advertising has been a massively hot potato and was much criticized during this election cycle for spreading misinformation, disseminating falsehoods and inflaming voters. Advertisers who want to run political or issue ads on Facebook must complete a series of identity checks before being authorized to place the ads. Each ad will appear with a small disclaimer stating that it has been “paid for by” a political organization. For those buying new ads, Facebook said it could take up to a week to clear the identity authorization and advertising review process. This news isn’t helpful, however, to former President Trump, whose Facebook account remains suspended indefinitely.
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