What Google’s Cookie Deprecation Delay Means for Publishers

Kicking third-party cookie deprecation down the road into 2023 might give marketers cause for some cheer, but, a common hallmark of Google’s updates all along remains: details are still scant, with questions outweighing answers, leaving publishers and marketers twisting in the wind. Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals are designed by committee so an element of iteration is to be expected. Equally, figuring out privacy-compliant ways to match ads to audiences and report on the results presupposes that bad actors aren’t able to reverse engineer algorithms to find personally identifiable data. Put another way, in these early stages, being vague-by-design makes sense. And in light of last week’s U.K. markets watchdog being granted oversight, another deadline extension is possible. Nonetheless, here are some of the burning issues on the minds of media and marketing professionals in light of Google’s latest announcement to postpone the timeline. We've also reached out to Google and await responses to our questions. BuzzFeed Acquires Complex Networks for $300 Million in Latest SPAC Never gonna let EU go One key question for publishers is when and how are federated learning of cohorts, the most mature of the 30 Privacy Sandbox proposals designed for targeting audiences, going to work in Europe? A criticism of FLoCs, which target audiences based on groups rather than individuals, has been that there is currently no form of consent mechanism, which Europe’s stringent General Data Protection Regulation requires for data collection. “For publishers in Europe, this further testing phase is crucial and needs to be made available in compliance with GDPR and ePrivacy regulations for a meaningful testing phase,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. Other proposals like FLEDGE, which focuses more on delivering ads in a privacy-compliant way, were due to start origin trials in June, according to sources who anticipate more delays. FLoCs versus cookies For now, in these early stages, the volume of data is too small to say for sure to what extent the quality matches. Google committed to less than half a percent of Chrome traffic as eligible to receive a cohort IDs when testing began in March. This is far from being statistically significant. For Swiss-based tech company 1PlusX, which has customers in the U.S., it can see only 0.2% of traffic using FLoC IDs. “The trials have not been very insightful, no one has said ‘I have detected this [new pattern] from FLoCs,” said Jürgen Galler, 1PlusX CEO. Companies need to tie semantic meaning to the jumble of numbers from FLoC cohorts. By the very nature of experimenting, the way companies are testing FLoCs is artificial and contrived. Cafe Media, which handles ad sales for many publishers, has been involved in FLoC trials since March and has been tracking the progress of trends that it can see by using these aggregates rather than individuals for ad targeting. Little has changed since trials started in March, said chief strategy officer Paul Bannister. “Now that we know the origin trial is ending in a few weeks, we're actually not prioritizing more analysis and work until FLoC goes back into a new origin trial or something else comes out,” Bannister told Adweek. As part of the W3C steering group, rolling out FLoC IDs to a larger audience has been requested. Google claimed in January from its internal tests that FLoCs were 95% as effective as cookie-based audience targeting, but that’s before publishers and platforms started opting out. FLoC blocking gets louder As part of the resistance, there are a few FLoC holdouts. With each publisher, or reportedly platforms like Amazon, opting out of contributing to FLoCs, in theory, its predictive quality diminishes. “One discussion that has not happened publicly is whether Google is putting its search page results into FLoCs,” said Galler. If not, it seems unlikely Google would expect walled gardens like Amazon with deep data troves to willingly contribute. Yet this diminishing of data quality from a few FLoC blockers is unlikely to damage Google’s fortune. For all the talk of publisher-based cohorts and first-party data platforms, there’s a sizable middle and long tail of publishers, plus those without strong data assets, who rely heavily on the open market, said Emily Palmer, digital marketing and media consultant. “They won't have much of a choice but to let Google take their data if they want to keep the Google paychecks coming,” Palmer said. “So overall, if FLoC passes compliance and anticompetitive checks, I don't see it loosening Google's hold; it will strengthen it.”

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Here's What Google’s Cookie Deprecation Delay Means for Publishers and Marketers

And what about FLoC blockers?

Lucinda Southern

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Lucinda Southern