Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
TCF? As In, “The ClusterFu…”
IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework, a mechanism for collecting (ostensibly compliant) consent under GDPR, has ping-ponged through European courts for more than two years.
The TCF, which is used by the majority of European publishers, was found to be invalid by the Belgian data protection authority – yet allowed to continue under appeal.
Now, Europe’s high court has struck a blow – though not necessarily a fatal one – against the TCF. The European Court of Justice has clarified that a consent string is personal data, which sets a higher bar in terms of protection.
More importantly, IAB Europe is now officially considered to be a joint data controller for the TCF. Joint controllership means IAB Europe is, at least in theory, liable for fines levied against publishers or ad tech companies using the TCF.
Last year, IAB Europe CEO Townsend Feehan told AdExchanger that this outcome would be “ultimately financially unsustainable for us.”
The Court of Justice allows an exception, however: IAB Europe is only a controller in situations where it directly influences the purposes for which personal data is being processed.
This decision is related to but separate from the Belgian lawsuit. (As if this stuff wasn’t confusing enough.) The TCF will continue to operate as usual until IAB Europe’s appeal of the Belgian authority’s decision is resolved, likely sometime this year.
An ID Bridge Too Far
Tension is simmering between buy-side and sell-side vendors, Adweek reports, although it hasn’t yet boiled over in IAB Tech Lab working groups.
The crux of the dispute is that SSPs and publisher vendors have taken to kludging together non-addressable data to approximate an individual. They then sell that “individual” to DSPs.
This “ID bridging,” as some call it, is akin to fingerprinting. Back in the day, ad tech companies would actually use the term “fingerprinting” (which is now poison) to promote and, arguably, oversell their capabilities.
The upshot here is that DSPs were (and are) often bidding on vague collections of signals that form a loose cohort, rather than an actual target.
Adweek reports that the problem became acute after Chrome deprecated cookies for 1% of its global base. SSPs package these signals primarily in cookieless environments.
If this amount of angst is stirred up when we’re talking about just 1% of Chrome users, imagine what will happen when the phaseout ramps up.
Chrome has not yet shared an official deprecation schedule – or any details about how it’ll approach the rollout. Chrome could incrementally increase from 1% to 10% to 30%, and so on. But another option is to decrease the life span of third-party cookies from weeks to days, until they eventually Benjamin Button away. The most likely scenario would involve some combination of the two.
Back To The Future
Google Ads has published documentation for an open-source approach to marketing mix modeling (MMM) called Meridian.
It’s amusing and somewhat ironic that major ad platforms are coming back around to MMMs, a one-time laughing stock in programmatic. “Like, seriously? You run a TV ad and then nine months later, or whatever, you find out whether it did anything?”
Until recently, multitouch attribution (MTA) was the hot thing, a tactic that attempts to assemble the puzzle pieces that, together, led to a conversion.
But Google and Apple slowly made MTA unfeasible. Google, for example, bought a top MTA company, Adometry, in 2014 and folded it two years later.
The giants – Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple – increasingly prefer MMM because it fits within a first-party data platform model.
Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ don’t distinguish one channel from another. PMax reports PMax results. It doesn’t break out YouTube, Gmail, Search, the open web, etcetera, as standalone media.
In other words, PMax treats “Google” as a single channel, not unlike “TV” or “radio,” so MMM is a good fit.
But, of course, the platforms also want to be judged at the macro level without having to provide advertisers with transparency into specific media placements. It’s a walled garden world, after all, and we just live … outside of it.
But Wait, There’s More!
TikTok faces a US ban in a new draft bill. [WSJ]
Large American tech companies profit from a Chinese ad spending spree. [NYT]
Advertisers shift retail media spending beyond Amazon to include Walmart, Target and more. [Digiday]
Meanwhile, Walmart, TikTok and Shein woo Amazon merchants at a Vegas retail event. [Bloomberg]
Why is your news site going out of business? [Talking Points Memo]
You’re Hired!
Kevel names Puja Rios as its president and COO and secures $23 million in Series C funding. [release]
Crackle Connex promotes Tim Ware to EVP of ad sales. [release]
IRIS.TV promotes Nancy Neumann-Grey to SVP of business development. [release]
Boostr names Fraser Woollard as EVP of business development and partnerships. [release]
