For the last several months... lord, it's been almost a year, I've been working on a task force with the IAB Tech Lab to evaluate elements of the Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox, which is a set of tools designed to help marketers reach their audience after 3rd party cookies are deprecated. It has been a slog. Over the course of time the document grew from 30 pages to now, I think, over 100 pages. It covers over 40 important use cases for advertisers, publishers and ad-tech vendors in-between. The question to answer: How well do the Sandbox tools support the use cases? My key takeaways: - Nothing is as useful or easy as the simple cookie - Implementation of Sandbox features is a heavy lift for most ad-tech companies - Publisher revenue will fall when cookies go away as these replacements are not as effective That being said, we're still marching toward a more privacy focused future in the online advertising ecosystem. Whether or not the Sandbox proves to be very useful, cookies will either go away, or regulation will step in and leverage the law to enforce privacy compliance. Change is coming.
Thank you Mark McEachran and IAB Tech Lab for the insights and confirming what we see.
Raj Chauhan
2w
Good stuff Mark & task force, thanks!
Principal Engineer
1wIt was August 8th of '23 that the I heard the first mention of the Privacy Sandbox Task Force -- simultaneously feels like it just happened and like it was a long, long time ago. I find it has been a good and useful journey from a learning perspective. My key takeaways: - Sandbox has the potential to add some new and novel capabilities that improve the AdTech stack, but without major reworking, which given our track record to date may take years, it will only be suitable for addressing a subset of use-cases and only able to absorb a small percentage of available budgets. - Replacing cookies is not a one company effort, it requires ecosystem collaborations that start with use case requirements gathering by parties who depend on the use cases. - The Privacy Sandbox effort has been invaluable in helping the industry understand the challenges we face with cookie deprecation and increasing privacy and in exploring some potential cookie alternatives, but what we really need is industry standards that are co-owned by everyone who adopts them and which everyone can build to, rather than specific technical implementations owned by their builders.