‘This isn’t an easy topic to understand’: Google’s identifier forces ad tech to make some hard choices

Ad tech’s optimistic posturing against Google’s renewed war against user-level tracking belies an uncertain outlook.

More than anything, the rebuke has ad tech vendors wondering who takes the pain, and can there be gain from the ensuing fallout. Naturally, they’re playing it safe until there’s a clearer answer.

“The market is in a state of chaos, many large publishers are in ‘shock freeze’ — at least in the short-term — while everyone figures out what to do next,” said Jochen Schlosser, chief technology officer at ad tech vendor Adform. “This isn’t an easy topic to understand, so there’s a lot of pressure on the expertise ad tech companies have internally to make the right calls and consult on limited intel.”

Companies that were bullish on one or two user-level identifiers, for example, spread their bets across a larger range of solutions if they weren’t already doing so.

Take PubMatic and Xandr, two of the biggest programmatic marketplaces in the space. Both businesses are testing Google’s cohort-based approach to targeting, which is also known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). But they’re also supporting FLoC’s main rival in the Unified ID 2.0 user-level identifier as well exploring ways to help publishers develop their own solutions.

The smartest approach, it seems, is to hedge your near term bets.

“It’s important for companies in our space to have a multi-pronged approach so we’re supporting other identifiers and FLoC as well as the wider Privacy Sandbox initiative and contextual solutions,” said Rajeev Goel, CEO of PubMatic. ‘Everything we’re hearing from ad buyers right now is that they don’t want one choice when it comes to identity. And we’re well positioned to have a very high degree of addressability of audiences and inventory on our platform in a wide variety of alternative IDs.”

Still, a lot of those advances depend on publishers.

“If a publisher has predicted their data collection on giving people a better experience but then goes and creates what is effectively a new cookie pool with [ad tech vendors] then it’s not just regulators concerns to be worried about. There’s also the risk of undoing all the customer trust they’ve built,” Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at BlueConic.

Without publisher data, user-level identifiers are reduced to being technology, not solutions. As it stands, ad tech vendors have a lot of work to do. Not only are publishers still figuring out how to collate and monetize data from their audiences, they’re also wary of sharing it.

“It’s vital that we keep in mind why the ad tech ecosystem is fighting so hard for these new unified IDs,” said an ad tech exec at a publisher in Europe on condition of anonymity. “The ecosystem’s goal with IDs 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 party data and journalism meant almost nothing; where cross-site tracking enabled third …read more

Source:: Digiday