The IAB Tech Lab is having its Howard Beale moment with the web browsers.
“We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur.
Through excessive limitations on data collection and monetization, the browsers have created “a hostile environment” for publishers to monetize in, he said. “They’ve overstepped their remit.”
But why should browsers get to control publisher monetization anyway?
That’s the question the Tech Lab is aiming to answer with the release on Thursday of an open-source framework for server-side ad management.
The solution, which the Tech Lab is calling a trusted server, “moves as much of the programmatic ecosystem out of the browser as possible,” Katsur said.
There’s no reason why real-time bidding requests and creative delivery or third-party network calls for targeting, measurement and campaign reconciliation can’t happen in a server, he said.
“It’s about giving power back to the pubs,” Katsur said.
Browser who?
Shifting the mechanisms of programmatic advertising from the browser into a trusted server is less complicated than it sounds.
The Tech Lab has already developed a working prototype that publishers and ad tech companies can use to test the trusted server implementation.
The prototype integrates directly with Prebid Server, an open-source header bidding solution for server-to-server auctions, so that publishers can easily connect with their SSP partners.
All processing happens within the trusted web server, including bid requests and responses, eliminating the need for third-party network calls, and the server uses whatever signals are available to either create a new ID or a first-party cookie.
“When bid responses come back from the server side, we make a call to the publisher ad server and then deliver the ads to the browser under the publisher’s first-party domain,” Katsur said. “And this is all happening in the publisher’s instance, so they’ve got a lot more control than when someone just drops a pixel.”
Testing, testing
So far, three large publishers have already committed to testing the trusted server, although Katsur didn’t name them, and supply-side platform Equativ has integrated its ad server into the prototype.
But the hope is that as many companies as possible test the trusted server prototype.
To facilitate that, Katsur told AdExchanger, the Tech Lab is making a six-figure investment in technical support, including engineering and operational resources to help publishers and their monetization partners get their hands dirty.
“We want all the ID resolution companies to jump in here, the measurement companies, the Prebid organization, publishers,” Katsur said. “It’s really about inviting the whole ecosystem in to enhance this framework.”
The Tech Lab will collect feedback from the industry on how the server-side solution is functioning and which features to include in the final version of the framework. It also plans to launch a Trusted Server Task Force in Q2.
‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’
Why launch this now, though? It’s not as if privacy-focused browser changes are anything new.
Because signal loss isn’t just a Chrome or Safari issue anymore.
“Those two stand out, of course, because of their market share, but there’s a wider initiative happening across all of the browsers,” Katsur said, alluding to early design proposals in the W3C for browser-based measurement and reporting.
One such proposal is called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), which uses on-device mechanisms to measure ad effectiveness while ostensibly protecting user privacy.
Katsur’s concern, he said, is that PPA “creates data asymmetry between advertisers, agencies and publishers where publishers may not have the appropriate amount of data to properly reconcile their buys.”
“This proposal is early and could change – I do want to stress that,” Katsur said. “But in the classic vein of ‘hope for the best and prepare for the worst,’ the trusted server helps publishers prepare for the worst.”
