The future of ads

On January 31st the IAB Tech Lab's report released their Gap analysis of Google’s Privacy Sandbox API’s.

They found that the Privacy Sandbox breaks real-time bidding & doesn't support a number of use cases that third party cookies do currently. There’s some great coverage from Allison Schiff on AdExchanger here 

Google's response to the IAB Tech Lab's critique of their API was released a week or so ago:

Google feels the Tech Lab misses the mark in many instances & that the APIs are not supposed to directly replace third-party cookies, by their very nature of being more private they could not deliver a like for like feature set. There’s a really good article from Andrew Byrd on Ad Monsters here

So who is right?  Well actually we think both sides have valid points. 

Ultimately though Alex Cone of Google hits the nail on the head when he says the Sandbox will require hard work and effort from all sides of the ecosystem to get up and running, but once this work (which we are sure at times will be painful) is done, Chrome users will have more privacy and advertisers will still be able to deliver relevant ads to them. 

Personally we’re looking forward to Google & The Tech Lab working closely together to make the transition as seamless as possible and are excited to actively be participating in the tests.  At Impact we will focus on putting ads in front of the right audiences, in high quality environments and importantly measuring whether these ads are actually seen. We feel this approach when supported by privacy preserving measurement where appropriate will continue to deliver strong results whilst being more respectful to user privacy.