On the other hand, they wonder whether Topics improves anything at all: skeptics can’t help but see this as a change that does little to deviate from Google’s playbook: leverage its scale to ensure that marketers have no choice but to accept what it says is the effectiveness of their spending.

“The fact that these segments come from a curated list is a good thing from a privacy perspective, but how can we ensure independent development of that taxonomy?,” asked Christer Ljones, head of data at Schibsted Marketing Services, the Scandinavian media group’s advertising arm. “We can’t accept Google’s business interest dictating that segment list.”

Which is to say it’s a reminder of how powerless publishers ultimately are in Google’s slipstream. Frustrating as that may be to some, many publishers refuse to reject the targeting update outright. They’d rather wait to see whether Topics has the aforementioned upside. If it does then it would reinforce the investments they’re making in their own data products — specifically publisher-provided IDs (PPIDs).

What’s old is new again

While they’ve been around for several years, PPIDs are only now having a moment thanks to a widespread purge of granular tracking; they facilitate targeting and measurement in the absence of third-party cookies, but only across a specific publisher’s media. The reason: publishers typically connect a PPID to a logged-in user or first-party cookie. Advertisers then use the PPID to reach unknown users with a frequency cap.

Useful as these identifiers are, they’re not widely available. Normally, they’re wheeled out by publishers looking to broker direct deals with advertisers. PPIDs don’t, however, work across all programmatic deal types like open auctions because publishers tend to keep them on a tight leash within their own systems. Otherwise, they run the risk of that data leaking out if it is shared more widely. Put another way: PPIDs aren’t scalable as an alternative to third-party-party cookies. Enter Google. Knowing that larger publishers are going to want ways to share PPIDs with more advertisers across all programmatic deal types now, it’s offering to be the middle-man that makes that happen.

“We’re talking to Google about how it’s building integrations that let us share our PPID with advertisers, but at the moment the solution is too broad,” said Sébastien Noël, managing director of programmatic, ad tech and monetization activities at Le Monde Group “We want to tailor its use to every Google solution.”

That’s a roundabout way of saying he’s concerned he …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron