‘Active curation’: As TCF’s future hangs in the balance, advertisers’ audience tracking plans are in a holding pattern

When the going gets tough for programmatic advertisers, their dollars tend to move toward places they trust.

So when the future of large-scale addressable advertising on the open web was thrown into doubt recently, it was no surprise what happened next.

Advertisers throttled their third-party audience buys and started urging publishers to take more control over how they got someone’s consent for advertising, according to eight ad execs interviewed for this article. To them, the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) guardrails erected by the industry to protect someone’s data while it’s being used for advertising across the European Union can’t be relied on — proof to them (at least for now) that audience tracking at this scale is becoming too difficult or even obsolete in many ways.

“We see an accelerated shift in advertiser priorities to ‘active curation’,” said Ruben Schreurs, group chief product officer at media management firm Ebiquity, which also advises marketers on ad tech strategy. “The TCF ruling being one factor, responsible media investment and preventing (inadvertent) funding of disinformation around the current war in Ukraine, advertisers are working with their agencies to radically change their approach to digital media buying.”

Rather than investing broadly through open marketplaces and chasing historical delivery reports for issues to use in exclusion lists, media plans — and audience data activation in particular — are being run in a more considerate manner with “strict selection processes” and more direct dealings with high-quality supply partners, said Schreurs.

Put simply, senior marketers are currently sifting through a technical and logistical quagmire right now.

“Current plans are to use cookie consent systems to only fire cookies or [retargeting] tags the client owns — ie now sync with the hundreds of partners the TCF encourages,” said Rob Webster, chief strategy officer at media consultancy Canton, which is advising marketers on how to adapt their audience targeting strategies to the current situation. “Plus there’s less third-party data buying that relates to cookies and big restrictions on retargeting.”

It’s safer — at least in the short term — for businesses to pause the collection of impression-level data from third-party sources. Senior marketers can ill-afford data privacy breaches these days. Not when so many people are concerned and confused over how they’re tracked online. Needless to say, conversations about TCF between marketers and publishers have been awkward.

“The impetus is falling more on publishers to control and anonymize consumer data given they’re a key collection point for it in the ad ecosystem,” said Sasha Auzins, who leads the global data and identity practice across EMEA at Prohaska Consulting. More than ever advertisers are trying to get closer to that point of collection, he continued.

Call it a flight to quality. Sometimes those quality impressions are found via curated marketplaces of trusted premium publishers, other times it’s by publisher alliances like Ozone Project. Regardless, the outcome is always the same: dollars moving out of open auctions where audience data is either unintentionally shared or used in unintended ways.

“In a well-curated fully-auditable private marketplace …read more

Source:: Digiday