Remember the tagline for MTV’s “The Real World”?
This is the true story of what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.
That could also serve as the tagline for the bombshell report released earlier this week by the IAB Tech Lab’s Privacy Sandbox Task Force analyzing whether the APIs in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox support what the Tech Lab calls “foundational digital advertising use cases.”
According to the Tech Lab’s analysis, the Privacy Sandbox either doesn’t support or degrades the functionality of the majority of basic use cases, including frequency capping, second-price auctions, VAST tags, competitive separation and the ability to exclude certain users from specific segments.
The APIs in the Privacy Sandbox are not set in stone, Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur acknowledges. For example, forthcoming feature requests to Chrome will help address several of the use cases that the Tech Lab says no longer work, such as exclusion targeting.
But publishers can’t afford to wait while engineers duke it out on GitHub.
“We need to consider what damage might get done between when the Privacy Sandbox launches and whenever potential improvements are eventually made,” Katsur said. “Yes, Chrome has a pretty robust road map over the next several years – but a lot of publishers live quarter to quarter.”
And there’s a long road to hoe, so get ready for more reports, research, studies, rebuttals and debate. Google plans to publish its technical response to the Tech Lab’s report sometime next week. Katsur said the task force will review Google’s feedback along with the other responses that come in during the public comment period, which closes on March 22.
Katsur spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Did you get any response from Google to the report since it was released beyond the official statement?
TONY KATSUR: No.
What feedback have you gotten from the industry?
It’s an exhaustive analysis, so it’s early to expect full feedback. But so far, the industry has been thankful that a full analysis has been done.
Assuming Chrome fully phases out cookies in Q4 without making substantial changes to the APIs, which use cases would experience the most disruption?
The biggest gap we see with the Privacy Sandbox is attribution reporting [which is degraded, according to the report].
All of advertising, not just digital, keys off of attribution. How did my budget perform? Who saw my ad? How can I use that information to inform future buys? Reporting data in the aggregate with noise injected will make it really difficult for agencies and brands to do campaign optimization.
Another big challenge is the lack of VAST tag support, which has been a standard for, what, nearly 16 years now? Yes, you can still execute digital video, but it’ll be so highly impractical and such a radical shift that we marked it as “not supported.”
Yes, the Privacy Sandbox changes everything, but – Devil’s advocate question – did third-party cookies ever work all that well for digital advertising? Match rates, for example, are pretty bad.
But digital is like that Winston Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all others. It’s not perfect, but it’s more performant than any other channel. The concern we have is that the Privacy Sandbox is actually going to make it worse and less relevant, with potentially lower publisher yield.
At the IAB’s Annual Leadership meeting last year, our executive editor, Sarah Sluis, interviewed you and IAB CEO David Cohen, and she asked for your take on the end of third-party cookies. You both said it was “anticlimactic.” This year, Sarah interviewed David at ALM again and he said that “the Privacy Sandbox and deprecation of third-party cookies will be a tremendous story this year.” What changed?
Cookie deprecation itself is anticlimactic, because it’s not a question of if third-party cookies are going away, but when.
It’s important to note that cookie deprecation is not the same thing as the Privacy Sandbox. These are separate issues that have been conflated by the industry and, frankly, by Chrome.
Now that we have a deeper understanding of how the Privacy Sandbox actually works, we can see the gaps that will make it difficult for the industry to even use it.
Is there a chance – or even a hope – that the Privacy Sandbox suffers the same fate as Do Not Track? Years of contentious, largely unproductive debate between opposing parties followed by … nothing.
That is not a hope or the goal of this assessment. It’s about giving Chrome feedback and working with them more closely on key issues.
Most of the feedback from the task force hasn’t been: “Privacy Sandbox, bad; cookies, good.” Rather, we believe that there are other ways to support the ecosystem within the paradigm of the Privacy Sandbox while also solving for critical use cases.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
🙏 Thanks for reading! And don’t let the Q4 third-party cookie deprecation deadline creep up on you. 🙀 As always, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with any comments or feedback.
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