Even opponents of Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation plan mostly agree that Google intends to follow through this time.
Which means that, by this time next year, advertisers will need to have already put their post-cookie campaign strategies in place.
Question is: Did advertisers and ad tech companies use the extra time they had thanks to multiple deadline delays wisely or did they procrastinate?
The Sandbox
The answer, unfortunately, is the latter.
One reason relatively little was achieved with post-cookie experimentation is that the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, the main laboratory for testing, hasn’t had much to offer in the way of sample sizes.
There simply weren’t enough Chrome browser users available to test against or publishers contributing to the APIs, such as Topics, to run statistically significant experiments.
Even Google Ads, which has massive scale of its own, tested the Privacy Sandbox APIs, and the results were … not impressive. Its experiment comparing cookie-based targeting to new targeting signals still used third-party cookies for attribution.
In January, 1% of Chrome users globally will be defaulted into the Sandbox user base.
But is it too little, too late?
As we head into 2024, there is a major open question as to whether Chrome Privacy Sandbox is, well, worth it.
It’s free to use, of course. But it also represents a big investment of time and engineering resources by companies like Criteo and RTB House.
Their hope is that these bets will pay off if the new Chrome Privacy Sandbox APIs – Topics, Protected Audiences and Attribution Reporting – replace third-party cookies as default ways to target and measure advertising on the web. But there is no guarantee.
Sandboxers
And not everyone in ad tech is willing to invest in the sandbox. The Trade Desk (TTD) closed the year with fireworks. Or shots fired, actually.
TTD’s VP of product, Bill Simmons, argued in a column earlier this month that Privacy Sandbox will depress web advertising and advocated instead for open identity products. (He namedropped the LiveRamp RampID, Epsilon’s Core ID and, of course, TTD favorite Unified ID 2.0).
Criteo spent more time and energy testing the Privacy Sandbox than any non-Google company. Todd Parsons, Criteo’s product chief, said he had a “visceral reaction” to TTD’s argument. Love it or not, he said, Privacy Sandbox is inevitable for companies whose business is to target ads online.
It cannot be overstated how extraordinary it is that TTD and Criteo, two bellwethers of independent, third-party programmatic, sharply diverge on the way forward with the Privacy Sandbox.
TTD has different competitive tensions with Google and its own preference for alterative ad IDs. But even the savviest programmatic vets, with years of experience in similar IAB working group situations, have trouble predicting what programmatic will look like a year from now.
Criteo CFO Sarah Glickman explained to investors last month why the company didn’t release 2024 guidance. “The uncertainty includes Privacy Sandbox,” she said.
Contextual
But are there any certainties?
If third-party cookies disappear and the Privacy Sandbox products prove ineffectual, contextual data is one way to target ads that could outlast third-party cookies and the sandbox APIs.
But 2023 was a year when contextual advertising became a contentious issue, as publishers, ad verification tech, SSPs and DSPs all made their case to be the contextual data provider.
In general, publishers should love a switch from user-level to contextual targeting (the “context” is their content). Dotdash Meredith, Axel Springer and other large media companies launched new contextual products designed specifically for post-cookie ad pitches.
But publishers are frustrated by the rise of contextual services from DSPs and verification vendors. IAS and DoubleVerify have fast-growing contextual data products – but they simply scrape the open web. Publishers earn nothing from the arrangement and lose when IAS or DV consolidates contextual demand.
Unfortunately, advertisers prefer one contextual service, not two dozen publishers each with its own version.
The alternates
And, so, confusion reigns in programmatic. But that means many different kinds of companies are making their play for relevance (and revenue) when third-party cookies are gone.
There are startups founded by programmatic vets that take a consumer-first approach to privacy-based data signals, such as Licorice, a single-sign-on service, and the inbox management product lockr.
Meanwhile, although Criteo placed a large bet on the Privacy Sandbox this year, it also acquired Brandcrush, which focuses on in-store media and related data sources.
And then there’s Captify, which is a third-party data seller that doesn’t rely on cookies but instead sources info based on what people search for on websites.
When third-party cookies go away, signals like Captify’s search intent-based audiences will be one of the few sustainable third-party segments – think “car intenders” or “business travelers” – said CEO Mike Welch, who took on the role in July.
There is always the caveat: if third-party cookies go away. But there is a growing consensus that, yes, 2023 will be the last year that third-party cookies were available across the web.
“It’s been off-again, on-again for years,” Welch said of Chrome’s cookie deprecation plans, “but it seems clear to me that it’s going to happen this time.”
