w3c

In today’s newsletter: The “user agent” concept is dead; principal-based buying is just arbitrage by another name; and a deep dive into BuzzFeed’s doomed acquisition of Complex.

There’s a lot more good than bad in Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Here’s why some of the current criticisms around the cookie alternative don’t hold water.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Not Buying It There’s been a burst of reports about new subscription-based, ad-free social media products. (Looking at you, Facebook.) It’s easy for these announcements to get caught up in trends like the pivot to subscriptions or revenue diversification.  But it is not […]

Alex Cone, product manager for the Google Privacy Sandbox, addressed some of the industry’s burning questions during AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO event in New York City last week.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple’s Bite Apple will now let paid subscription apps (think The Economist or meditation app Calm) offer audio content exclusively for their subscribers, a trendy tactic in Podcast Land. Spotify has a similar idea, but it partners with the subscription service Patreon. And […]

It’s happening, folks. The Chrome Privacy Sandbox is going live, third-party cookies will be phased out on Chrome by the end of next year – and don’t expect any further deadline extensions, says Victor Wong, senior director of product for all things Privacy Sandbox.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Off Topic The ad industry isn’t sold on the Topics API, which becomes widely available in Chrome’s update July 12. The Topics API is “slightly less creepy than storing every last behavioral detail about someone centrally,” Luke Regan, UK managing partner at performance […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Stores Of Value From regional chains to the largest department and grocery stores, seemingly every retailer is in the retail media network business.  Retail ad spend forecasts have leapt to $25 billion and more. Except those numbers mostly track Amazon’s growth, plus a […]

In the two years since the beginning of the end of third-party cookies, we have learned quite a lot about the promises and problems with a post-cookie web. Now, as web developers, we can be pretty confident the end will come – if we can make a few key things happen, writes Don Marti, VP of Ecosystem Innovation at CafeMedia.

Almost one year ago, the W3C created a small sub-group called the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). And, against the odds, the PATCG has made theoretical progress on a number of key ad tech and privacy logjams in the past year.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Unfluential  Meta claims to have taken down a Chinese political influence operation that used fake accounts to agitate and misinform Americans. The China-backed ring of accounts focused on hot-button issues, such as gun control and abortion, from both sides. This was about China […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All A-Board The W3C created a board of directors and filed to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Hooray!  You seem unenthused.  It may sound dull, but this is important news.  MIT informed the W3C last year that it would no longer host the organization. But […]

Google recently began testing Topics API, the latest part of its Chrome Privacy Sandbox. It’s a significant improvement over FLoC, but it leaks audience information from trustworthy sites and enriches large platforms at the expense of niche or independent sites – especially sites that invest time and skill to cover categories in detail, writes Don Marti, VP of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia.

Three web standards organizations tasked with the online ad industry overhaul, the W3C, the IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org, called out for help this week during a series of presentations and a joint panel at the AdMonsters Ops conference in New York City.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TikTok TV Last week, TikTok announced a new comedy docuseries you’ll have to pay to watch. Wait, what? It was only a matter of time before TikTok launched its subscription show. TikTok, which prefers not to be called a social media platform, thank you […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Path Less Traveled More publishers have signed up for OpenPath, The Trade Desk’s direct buy-to-sell-side integration. Since launching in February, TTD says it’s “registered interest” (interesting turn of phrase) in OpenPath from more than 100 publishers.  The latest crop to, uh, register […]

The Privacy Sandbox proposals are moving forward in an organization whose governance is in the air and whose leadership is disengaged. We unpack what’s going on at the W3C with working group member and IAB Tech Lab advisor Alex Cone. He also weighs in on what went wrong with FLoC.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the main technical standards developer of the internet, will lose longtime university partner MIT as administrator and US host organization at the end of this year. Many W3C members are advocating for a new organizational structure as a non-profit funded by members and board members – a familiar structure for industry orgs. But there is no immediate solution and MIT won’t renew its host contract at the end of the year. The clock is ticking.

In the past month, there’s been a flurry of Privacy Sandbox-related news. Are we on the brink of adopting universal standards for targeting and measurement? Salesforce’s Martin Kihn says “Not quite.”

The first meeting of the W3C Private Advertising Technology Group (PATCG) took place this week, bringing together the biggest American browser and tech companies. One important new item on the agenda is called Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), a joint proposal by Mozilla and Meta engineers. If adopted, it would improve cross-device or cross-browser attribution tracking without tripping any of Apple or browser-based privacy policies. That’s a big “if” though. And, even optimistically, could take years to ship.

It’s time to stop talking and start doing. That’s the raison d’être, in a nutshell, behind a new community group – the Private Advertising Technology Community Group – housed within the World Wide Web Consortium.

First-Party Time  As first-party data sets grow, marketing operations are reining in their ad costs and boosting ROI, The Wall Street Journal reports. For example, PepsiCo has amassed around 75 million user records from its consumer base. This data saves tens of millions of dollars on ad spend, according to Shyam Venugopal, the SVP of […]

Although privacy and online advertising are often framed as mortal enemies – or at least mutually exclusive – it doesn’t have to be the case, says Lindsey Shepard, CMO of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. “The advertising ecosystem online is fundamentally broken right now – I believe that,” says Shepard (although, you can call her “Shep”). […]

What is privacy? Turns out, there’s no easy answer, even for David Temkin, Google’s senior director of product management for ads privacy and user trust. “Privacy is not itself quantifiable. It’s a subjective sense; it’s relative to people’s expectations,” Temkin says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “[Privacy is] relative to what they understand […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. W3C Meets Ad Tech Drama The W3C is negotiating a tricky influx of members and attention as it becomes an increasingly important stakeholder in online advertising. That’s because browser operators like Chrome, Apple’s Safari WebKit group, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla are the W3C natives, […]

Source: A Complete Introduction to Terry Pratchett’s Discword. “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 James Rosewell, founder and CEO at 51Degrees. Pillars The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was set up to standardize an open world wide […]

There’s been kerfuffle after kerfuffle (after kerfuffle) at the World Wide Web Consortium since Google first announced its plans in January 2020 to kill off third-party cookies in Chrome. At the time, Google encouraged ad tech companies to join the W3C’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) as a way to provide feedback on and […]

Privacy Sandbox may have just hit a serious snag. In a document published last week, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), a prominent working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, referred to the first-party sets (FPS) proposal within the Privacy Sandbox as “harmful to the web in its current form.” TAG also cast doubt on […]

Google said in a blog post on Wednesday that it won’t use alternative methods to track users online once it ends support for third-party cookies in Chrome – and that it disapproves of using email as an alternative identifier for ad tracking. In other words, Google is stating for the record that it will not cook […]

“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 James Rosewell, founder and CEO at 51Degrees. “Upon the uncharted Island of Imagination in the middle of the Lake of Let’s-Pretend lives the ghastly Google and his retinue of gorgeous Google […]