The below is a statement by Lukasz Wlodarczyk, Private Ads Team Leader and Director of Global Inventory Partnerships, at RTB House – providing his thoughts around what Google’s updated timeline and delay for Privacy Sandbox means for the advertising industry.
“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.
Since January 2020, we have put every effort into making our platform fully compatible with the Privacy Sandbox vision. We recently announced a vital milstone: RTB House is the first DSP to successfully use Privacy Sandbox’s FLEDGE simulation, globally buying real advertising impressions for almost 500 advertisers. This is proof that the RTB House platform infrastructure is ready for the upcoming changes. As a successful contributor to the Privacy Sandbox, we proposed two enhancements (PLTD and OBTD) which were fully incorporated in the current version of FLEDGE and significantly improved Google’s original proposal, both from the perspective of usability and competitiveness.
We perceived today’s update to be a reaction to the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) engagement, and feel it is in line with the commitments Google has offered. The new, more realistic timeline should provide wider engagement on the testing stage of FLoC and FLEDGE and thus provide even better quality for the end solution implemented inside the browser – one that is 100% market-ready. We believe that these are both positive aspects.
Google’s update provides a high-level timeline with the community. Both advertisers and publishers will get more time for engagement, testing, and contributions to the Privacy Sandbox. However, the general direction in which things are moving has not changed.
Still, according to Google’s commitments, we are missing a detailed timeline for the testing and implementation of particular proposals inside the Privacy Sandbox.
What does this mean for advertisers?
Google will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023. This seems like a bit more time compared to the end of 2022, but this also might be interpreted as direction is set and known.
At RTB House we see this as a positive change because it only proves that we had accurate predictions and this allows us to spend additional time for testing and educating advertisers about the next generation advertising systems and navigating them towards new marketing strategies, combining individual and group-based targeting.
This highlights the necessity of using technology that combines multiple targeting approaches available on the market. By working with RTB House, you will be able to be a part of Privacy Sandbox’s FLEDGE simulation and the extensive testing procedure of Chrome origin trials by using a platform which is independent from the company-owned browser.
What does this mean for publishers?
Similarly to the advertiser’s perspective, these additional months bring opportunity for publishers to engage, test and contribute. The new, more realistic timeline should provide wider buy-side engagement on the testing stage of FLoC and FLEDGE, and thus provide even better quality of the end solution implemented inside the browser. This will increase the value of advertising budgets allocated to the open web, and thus the revenues of publishers.
RTB House is glad to see that Google is no longer the only browser working on privacy-preserving APIs that address legitimate advertising use cases. At RTB House, we warmly welcome Microsoft Edge’s PARAKEET and look forward to Firefox’s future announcement, as we picture officially supported methods by browsers as solutions that have the most potential to scale upwards and bring noticeable revenue for publishers.
We’re excited to continue our collaboration with other industry leaders on privacy-preserving advertising that addresses legitimate use cases and efficient, relevant advertising; while increasing the competitiveness between ad tech and publishers, no matter what size they are.”
For more information, visit https://blog.rtbhouse.com/what-does-the-updated-timeline-for-the-privacy-sandbox-mean-for-advertising-market-participants/
