On Wednesday, Google reinforced its stance on how ad targeting should work after it withdraws support for third-party cookies next year. The announcement moved markets but left some critical questions unanswered, and it has led to the loss of several billion dollars in shareholder value among ad-tech players.
In short, Google is doubling down on its Privacy Sandbox initiative, and companies without first-party relationships with consumers won’t be able to use their identity solutions on Google’s demand-side platform DV360, ad platform Google Ads and AdSense once Chrome no longer supports third-party cookies.
This is a body blow to the independent ad-tech sector’s proposed approach to audience targeting which has primarily centered on using hashed email addresses as a substitute for the cookie.
Commenting on the news, Ruben Schreurs, chief product officer at Ebiquity, said that many of the workarounds to continue addressable advertising after the demise of such identifiers such as third-party cookies “failed to get the point” and that this was indicative of a collective grieving process throughout the industry.
No matter how much you hash or anonymize data, it remains personal data if at some point it can be matched to an individual. It’s really as simple as that,” he said. “In terms of the five stages of grieving [and] the loss of third-party addressability in online advertising … the industry is mostly stuck in the first three stages: denial, anger and bargaining. The sooner we move on to acceptance, the better for all.
To read the full article in Adweek, click here.
First featured 04/03/2021.
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