Google’s new publisher group shows a willingness to collaborate, say members including AccuWeather and Leaf Group

By Kate Kaye

To publishers like AccuWeather, Advance Local and Leaf Group, Google’s willingness to make people from its ads and Chrome teams available to answer questions from a fledgling group of publishing execs is not only indicative of a shift in how the company engages publishers as it develops tech that will affect businesses throughout the digital media and ad ecosystem — it also stands in stark contrast to Apple’s go-it-alone approach to implementing tracking changes, which brought tidal waves that will surge throughout the industry.

“They’re showing a certain vulnerability that is not always associated with Google and that’s been remarkable to see,” said Jeff Sutton, vp of ad tech and programmatic at news publisher Advance Local, which publishes sites including Cleveland.com and Oregon Live, and is a group member. He called the approach of Google execs and engineers in the video meetings “open and candid.”

Digiday was first to report earlier this week on the existence of the group, which is comprised of around 20 to 25 publishers and has convened monthly since March with Google ads and Chrome division execs and engineers.

Publishers in the group, which includes very large, publicly-traded firms as well as smaller companies such as small site ad management firm CafeMedia, said the fact that Google has been willing to respond in the meetings to off-the-cuff questions from publishers — and sometimes even admit they aren’t sure of some answers — is a positive sign of the tech platform’s acknowledgement that it needs to clarify confusion and even soothe hard feelings sparked when Google caught the industry off-guard in announcing its intentions to kill off third-party cookies in its Chrome browser and in subsequent unclear blog posts about cookie-replacement ad tech through its Privacy Sandbox initiative.

“There was a lot of backlash from the publishing community in Twitter and Slack channels and confusion,” when Google first announced its decision to deprecate third-party cookies, said Scott Messer, svp media at Leaf Group, which owns publications including Livestrong and eHow and participates in the meetings. “If you looked at some of their early efforts in Chrome changes and proposing solutions, they may not have been well understood by the community, which creates confusion and leads to slower adoption of even progress of the idea,” he said.

Rectifying Google’s missteps

Though members said the meetings are not intended to be clandestine, this is the first time some of them are being named. In general, publishers hesitate to speak on the record about issues related to their partnerships with Google because of their reliance on the company for managing key components of their revenue streams. “Google are almost everybody’s largest partner,” said Messer. “We have a responsibility to at least try to help them get it right.”

The agenda at these meetings focuses a lot on Privacy Sandbox technologies in development at Google, including its now-in-flux Federated Learning of Cohorts ad targeting method. Publishers and Google itself told Digiday other, more general topics — such as first-party data …read more

Source:: Digiday