Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The Shifting Sandbox
The Chrome Privacy Sandbox is still chugging along despite Google’s reversal on third-party cookie deprecation. The Sandbox team announced new updates based on feedback from testers on Wednesday.
Chrome’s Protected Audience API will soon include fields for designating private marketplace deal IDs and seat IDs. This update is a concession to programmatic’s curation craze and the growing popularity of PMPs to package inventory minus undesirable placements.
Chrome is also extending the lifespan for Protected Audience interest groups from 30 days to 90 days to make the Privacy Sandbox more viable for advertisers with longer consideration cycles.
And the Protected Audience API is also adding support for measuring what Chrome calls a user’s “clickiness,” as in, a person’s likelihood to interact with the ads they see.
Companies can now register views and clicks within the Chrome browser. Then, when it’s time to auction an impression for that user, clickiness signals from a predefined time frame can be included in the bidding logic to optimize campaign performance. These signals will be hashed – which is good news for user privacy, but also means more of the same black-box vibes advertisers have come to expect from Google.
Free YouTube
The DOJ’s ad tech antitrust trial against Google doesn’t directly involve YouTube.
But the outcome of the case could change the fate of YouTube, which is quickly climbing the connected TV ranks as the top-viewed streaming service in the US, based on Nielsen data from July.
Currently, advertisers can only use Google’s ad buying platform, DV360, to buy inventory on YouTube and other Google-owned channels, including display and search.
Keeping YouTube locked within DV360 has helped contribute to Google’s advertising growth. For example, Google hasn’t historically offered competitive discounts in video ad auction deals as other ad exchanges have done, The Information reports. But if Google is forced to pare back or divest parts of its ad tech business, it could loosen DV360’s “ironclad grip” over YouTube, several agency and ad tech execs say.
Reopening access to YouTube would naturally introduce more competition and ultimately lower prices for ad inventory on YouTube. Access to YouTube could also benefit some of Google’s biggest buy-side competitors (cough, The Trade Desk).
But for now, YouTube remains stuck behind Google’s garden walls.
Kubient KO
Ad network Kubient has been an unsolved mystery since last year, when it announced a merger with Adomni, a digital out-of-home network, and got listed on the NASDAQ.
It was delisted later in the year and has been essentially defunct since then. [Props to Ari Paparo, who’s doggedly kept after Kubient for its hard-to-believe revenue claims dating back to 2020.]
Kubient was all in on marketing itself around AI before it was trendy. Problem is, it didn’t have any real revenue or lines of business.
And now the mystery of Kubient has been explained with the news that its former CEO, Paul Roberts, has been charged by the US Postal Inspection Service in an accounting fraud scheme.
Roberts partnered with another unnamed ad tech company to arrange contracts whereby each would spend around $1.3 million with the other. No money passed hands, and no services were rendered. They just passed the money between them, which was then credited as $1.3 million in earned revenue as part of Kubient’s IPO.
But Wait, There’s More!
The DOJ vs. Google antitrust trial, Day 7: We’re building a wall, and AdX is paying for it. [Marketecture]
YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads. [The Verge]
Every 100-word email generated with ChatGPT requires a 16-ounce bottle’s worth of water to keep OpenAI’s servers cool enough to run, analysis suggests. [Washington Post]
Paramount undergoes another round of layoffs, this time in the advertising division. [Variety]
LinkedIn has been training AI on user data without notifying users in its terms of service. [404 Media]
You’re Hired!
Kargo hires Eric Hoffert as its new CTO. [Release]
