The Ozone View leads every issue of The Pivot, our publisher newsletter. In a nutshell, it’s our take on industry developments and opinions from across digital media, from publisher strategies to innovations from ad tech.
Next year, Google's third-party cookie disappearing act from Chrome is looming large. It's a huge change, but a lack of meaningful guidance for publishers from Google about its Privacy Sandbox is worrying. Check out Github, we're told, but its complexity hardly builds confidence.
Like it or not, these changes will impact the way business is done and publishers are still grappling with the likely outcomes. With the general release of the Privacy Sandbox API there has been a marked uptick in chatter. Google's Alex Cone has been busy, touring the conference circuit and recently addressed a number of burning questions in this briefing at Programmatic I/O New York.
Our view
There's some interesting insight here, such as how to run multi-seller auctions and how to integrate pre-bid. But it doesn’t address any of the publishers concerns we hear. Will it work? Will I make more or less revenue?
The challenge is that all testing is taking place in the middle layer, with SSPs and DSPs. Buyers and sellers have so far been left behind, as recently proven by YouGov and Adform who claim only 33% of UK marketers said they are well prepared for 3PC removal. Google products will likely work but what about the wider ecosystem?
Publishers need privacy solutions that help them control monetisation of their audiences across all platforms irrespective of which industry solution or solutions they want to adopt. This talks to the need for interoperability – and tooling – ensuring that solutions put the publisher in the driver's seat rather than ceding control to the middle (again).
When it comes to The Privacy Sandbox, there are a few things that publishers need in order to assess this new tech when it comes in Q1 2024:
Reporting in GAM that allows them to see monetisation with and without cookies
A flag in Chrome that can be picked up in the bidstream to understand the same impact across a publishers whole programmatic stack for users that are opted into the 1%
The ability to do end to end testing with buyers who will share learnings and actively try and buy using this protocol
Of course, there is a bit of a catch22 for testing as buyers may just avoid that 1% of users opted in, in favour of the existing 3PC until they are forced to change.
