‘The data strategies of these companies aren’t progressive enough’: 10 Confessions on the pivot to privacy

Enjoy the relative calm in the privacy world, it may prove short-lived.

Google’s decision to postpone its cull on third-party cookies has kept worst-case scenarios at bay throughout the industry. But uncertainty over who holds what leverage and where the upcoming blind spots will be, is keeping prudent ad execs on edge. Angst is bubbling to the surface as ad execs are scrambling for ways to feel more certain in uncertain times. In the latest in our Confessions series, we expose the hard truths about the industry’s attempts to reconcile privacy with personalization.

These 10 interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Confessions of a consulting firm exec on the squeezed middle of publishers

I know holding companies that are mandating 80% private marketplaces starting next year, which means it’s going to be back to direct sales using programmatic as a vehicle just to execute. So publishers who either have good ad network relationships or have a sales team will succeed. The longer tail ones, however, won’t have either of those safety crutches and so will have to work with ad networks. SSPs aren’t built to be ad network type of operations.

Confessions of a chief media officer on agency IDs

We’ve tested many of these solutions and don’t feel like there’s much of a future there. We’ve tested these alternatives in Europe and the U.S. and the results have been underwhelming, whether it’s a very buggy service that doesn’t really do what it’s meant to or they just don’t have the requisite scale for us. We used one in France where we had around 30% of our audience and not all of that was accurate. The data strategies at these companies aren’t progressive enough.

Confessions of a publisher on growing skepticism over ID tech

It’s vital that we keep in mind why the ecosystem (tech companies, data providers, measurement vendors etc.) is fighting so hard for these new global or unified IDs. The ecosystem’s goal with these solutions is to recreate the world of yesterday, which was not a particularly nice place for publishers to be in. Here publishers were reduced to being providers of users (at a price that kept dropping); where first-party data and journalism meant almost nothing; where cross-site tracking enabled third parties to build and expand ever larger data pools.

Confessions of a media agency exec on Apple’s growing influence over advertising

As it stands, our clients are playing catch-up when it comes to Apple. There’s so much they need to get their head around in this protracted pivot to privacy that Apple’s role there has gone unnoticed somewhat. It’s all been overwhelming. That said, they’re starting to pay more attention. And we’re setting up initiatives internally to help make sense of it all, particularly when it comes to contingency planning because there may come a time when they have to ease their reliance on Apple’s ecosystem when you think about how much control it’s exerting over the App Store and tracking …read more

Source:: Digiday