Google

In this part of the “Media Review” series, we take a deeper look at five stories – including an analysis of the most influential stakeholders in the cookieless environment, UID 2.0 GDPR issues, and Google’s presentation of a new concept aimed at providing a privacy-preserving federated identity before third-party cookies are phased-out.

Six months ago, during IETF 111, Google engineers made it clear that they were approaching a new iteration of FLoC, which was related to site topics. Yesterday, they finally announced Topics API. The ad topics concept has also been explored by Meta engineers in their Ad Topic Hints proposal, which builds on user feedback to displayed ads. Also, the PAURAQUE proposal from NextRoll was proposed in such a way that users could define topics which are interesting for them and can be used for personalization.

In this chapter of our “Media Review” series, we describe the results of the CMA investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox, Tech Lab’s release of “Seller Defined Audience” and more.

In 2023 Google announced the depreciation of third-party cookies and began the development of the Google Privacy Sandbox. However, the deadline has once again been pushed back, this time to 2025]. The reason? “The need for more time to evaluate and test the new technologies.” Despite positive developments, RTB House’s own tests of the FLEDGE proposal, with nearly 8 million ads in 50 countries, have shown that there is still plenty of work to be done to build effective cookieless alternatives.

As a leading buy-side platform, RTB House has been involved in the development of the Privacy Sandbox ever since its announcement. Being highly experienced in retargeting, we put particular emphasis on FLEDGE. This proposal has been in preparation for years now and has been available for testing in Chrome since April 2022.

We already shared our initial findings from the experiments in a previous article. It covered the availability of the elements for testing, our setups, and the initial results.

In this article, we would like to provide an update on the status of both the market and RTB House as of the end of January, give more insights and results, and share our perspective on the future testing and implementation phases.

Everyone loves a good challenge, but some are tougher to tackle than others. For marketers, the big one is the personalization paradox. 71% of consumers prefer personalized ad content, but 74% are also concerned about how advertisers are actually using their personal data. This creates a problem for marketers. They want to reach out to their customers with personalized content but often rely on tracking technologies that are considered invasive. Fortunately, there is an answer to this particular paradox. Brands can use data-driven strategy to leverage large anonymized datasets that provide rich personalization at scale without compromising on privacy.