This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs.
While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity.
And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a cluster, and while the industry is inching towards viable solutions, there are still a lot of questions that need answering.
For instance, to what extent can marketers use both the proposals in the Privacy Sandbox with Unified ID 2.0 or any other of the many identity resolution solutions currently being engineered? How will the various Privacy Sandbox proposals play with each other? And while many solutions, like cohorts, are designed with privacy in mind – are they actually private enough?
Google, for instance, has to seriously consider how to let people opt out of cohorts, and it’s also working to ensure people aren’t placed in groups that are deemed sensitive. (Check out Sarah Sluis’ interview with Chetna Bindra).
Plus, what dark horse projects might attempt to circumvent the identity crackdown? As an example, the state-backed China Advertising Association is allegedly coming up with a workaround if Apple’s IDFA isn’t available.
In many ways, all of this work is happening because not everyone in the advertising industry has been responsible using consumer data. Sarah, quoting Zenith’s Maurice Barron, compares it to the sign on the office microwave warning employees not to microwave fish.
“It’s for that one person out of 100 that’s microwaving fish,” she says. “That’s ad tech’s problem in general: there’s always one person microwaving fish, who ruins it for the rest of us.”
