Perspectives

The last couple of years have seen a revolutionary change in online consumer behavior, with some brands needing to adapt quite radically. That, along with tighter privacy controls, has left agencies wondering what the future of advertising holds and how campaigns will look in 2022 and beyond.

For an answer, we asked Desmond Lawrence, Global Digital Activation Director at Havas Media Group, to set out the key trends he sees in consumer behavior and what that means for the brands and agencies targeting them in the years ahead.

Google Chrome set an ambitious goal in their January 2020 announcement to have the key privacy-preserving advertising technologies deployed by late 2022 for the developer community to start adopting them. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox and revealed a plan to phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

By the end of 2023, it will be impossible to use third-party cookies in Chrome which currently commands a 70% market share. The loss of third-party cookies poses challenges for marketers when it comes to tracking and understanding consumers’ online buying behaviors. RTB House spoke to Piotr Śladowski, Digital Communication Manager at Wavemaker Poland, to understand how media agencies are helping brands best prepare for the new era of cookieless digital advertising.

For years, brands and agencies have been using third-party cookies to track website visitors’ behavior, improve the user experience, and collect trending martech data from across the web to optimize audience targeting strategies. However, this year Google announced that it would be joining Firefox and Safari in removing third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by 2023, ultimately changing the future of advertising. Marketers across the world have spent the last 12 months digesting, understanding, and preparing for this change. In this article, Julie Keating, VP of Digital Marketing and Media at Havas Edge, shares her journey from first hearing Google’s announcement to change the future of advertising, to recent learnings from campaigns that have used cookieless targeting solutions.

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.

Just two days after publishing Topics API, Google shared more details about the FLEDGE API specification for the upcoming Origin Trials. It is definitely a positive move, as it improves the industry’s understanding of the scope of tests that will be possible in the upcoming months. The specification includes essential features for advertising efficiency and utility, such as those created by RTB House – Product-level TURTLEDOVE and Outcome-based TURTLEDOVE. Sadly, the testing phase timeline hasn’t been updated for months now, so a more detailed timeline is still unavailable.