“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Lukasz Wlodarczyk, VP of programmatic ecosystem growth & innovation at RTB House.
Everyone in our industry has been on the edge of their seat since Google first began developing the Privacy Sandbox more than three years ago. But things have been moving slowly.
Testing for Google’s FLEDGE, a remarketing tool that serves ads to custom audiences without the need for cross-site tracking of individuals, has finally opened up to the industry earlier this year. Yet, the industry hasn’t jumped at the opportunity to participate.
As it stands, only three companies are actively testing FLEDGE: RTB House, Criteo and Google itself. And, though Google Chrome continues to publish articles on the applications of Privacy Sandbox APIs and host regular events, there is little desire from other parties to get involved.
This is concerning. The cookieless future is virtually here, and the time to experiment with alternatives is now.
Little support supplied
SSPs have been particularly unwilling to engage with the concepts proposed in the Privacy Sandbox. Some are concerned that FLEDGE would make it difficult for them to provide added value to publishers. Others say that FLEDGE is not an ideal solution because it focuses on retargeting, while most of the demand on the supply side actually comes from non-retargeting campaigns.
There’s also a lack of clarity regarding how Google Ad Manager will support multi-SSP auctions, and FLEDGE’s design doesn’t enable SSPs to build a cross-site interest group to represent multiple buyers bidding against each other for the same impression as an alternative for TOPICS API.
Publishers have been more willing to participate than SSPs, including leading players like CafeMedia and Ringier Axel Springer. However, most were initially unaware of the testing possibilities and had little clarity around how integrations between SSPs and publisher ad servers would work.
In fact, the scarcity of knowledge and involvement in the FLEDGE trials has not just been a problem on the supply side, but also across the entire advertising ecosystem.
Google needs to find ways to incentivize members of the ecosystem to get involved. It could do this by opening up the privacy-preserving way of provisioning additional data to the ecosystem or by restricting the capabilities of alternative, privacy-intrusive tracking mechanisms, such as fingerprinting.
FLEDGE’s future
While FLEDGE represents a major step toward a more privacy-preserving digital advertising, it’s clear that it is still far from production-ready. This origin trial is just a start.
More focus needs to be paid to the integrations between the buy and supply side. A lot of effort is required to evaluate, develop and validate the different types of FLEDGE implementation on the SSP side, while the tech stacks on both sides of the ecosystem need to be adjusted or replaced. The key elements of FLEDGE need to be enabled for testing. Plus, the FLEDGE-enabled Chrome user base needs to reach a sufficiently high level, so that the data can be properly analyzed and compared against cookie-based and alternative tools.
Many key elements have never been tested in the browser and adjustments will almost certainly be required. But, with support across the digital advertising industry, a workable solution is certainly achievable.
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