Why Testing Google's Cookie-Alternative Privacy Sandbox Is Still Minimal

Chief among the concerns at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Marco Island, Fla., this week is that Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, a pack of solutions to replace third-party cookies, is not yet ready to meet the demands of programmatic advertising. Publishers, ad-tech firms and marketers at the event pointed to vague aggregate reporting features, fewer video solutions and a relatively complicated set of proposals, all leading to almost nonexistent testing. However, despite problems with Privacy Sandbox—like questions with cross-domain tracking in Related Web Sets and the fact buyers cannot easily test in Google ad platform DV360—the technologies underpinning the proposals are still a work in progress. “Privacy Sandbox is a product that’s in process,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, which is publishing a report analyzing areas for improvement in Privacy Sandbox in the coming days. It will be “tight” but doable for Google to address these industry concerns before the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority reviews the Privacy Sandbox proposals in the second half of the year, he added. Anthony Chavez, vp of product management at Google, Privacy Sandbox, said that while some focus on objections, the Privacy Sandbox team is collaborating with partners focused on solutions. "At the event, we’ve been encouraged by the number of IAB members who are building ad-tech offerings using the Privacy Sandbox building blocks," Chavez said, noting that the beginning of the current programmatic ecosystem also took a long time and had similar chicken-or-the-egg problems with testing. "Building a more private web with privacy-preserving advertising will be no different." Buyers Can't Test Privacy Sandbox APIs in Google's Ad Platform DV360 Judged as a finished product A small group of ad-tech professionals has been testing Privacy Sandbox proposals like the contextual-style targeting Topics API (application-programming interface) since they’ve been public. But most of the industry is still in the learning phase and only just starting to test, several sources said. “I don’t think anyone has presented it as anything but a work in progress, but it is being judged as a finished product,” said Amanda Martin, senior vice president of monetization and business strategy at publisher network Mediavine. In a Jan. 10 blog post, Victor Wong, senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, disagreed with the notion that Privacy Sandbox must be completely designed before the industry can adopt the technology. Room for improvement: aggregate reporting and video solutions Privacy Sandbox’s aggregate reporting is currently too vague for publishers and marketers to effectively understand, said Katsur. Plus, Privacy Sandbox currently has fewer solutions for online video, a category of inventory where publishers typically fetch higher CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), he noted. Moreover, a solution for retargeting, Protected Audience API, runs ad auctions in the browser instead of the ad server, which potentially undermines contractual agreements between publishers and the ad-tech providers that are typically involved in the bidding process, Katsur said. “When we tackled Sandbox, very candidly, it was a bit of a labyrinth,” said Andrew Casale, president and CEO of supply-side platform Index Exchange, at a panel hosted by Google Privacy Sandbox at the conference. “There was documentation, but it wasn’t super intuitive.” Privacy Sandbox will be constantly updated based on industry feedback, said Anthony Chavez, vp of product management at Google, at the panel. Testing woes Sources at the IAB's ALM said testing among their clients is still minimal to nonexistent. “We’re a small company,” said Josh Koran, chief product officer at measurement firm and demand-side platform InMarket. “We can’t afford to distract our engineering team if ... there is no evidence that it works.” But testing is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Publishers want to know that they will receive ad dollars for bids if they test Privacy Sandbox solutions, and buyers are waiting for fully baked offerings from the sell side. Even companies spending months understanding and implementing Privacy Sandbox are still not seeing an influx of testing. At one SSP, Privacy Sandbox testing comes mostly from test budgets, sometimes from the coffers of a DSP and not individual brands. At Mediavine, testing just started this month, Martin said. Marketers Shift to IP Address Band-Aids Amid Cookie Deprecation This doesn’t mean no one is taking action. DSPs like Criteo and RTB House have already extensively tested Privacy Sandbox, and smaller buying platforms like Programmatic Mechanics are integrating into Sandbox so that their clients can test it. “There’s nothing else we’ve seen that is that viable,” said Ben Lewis, vice president of business development at DSP and managed service platform Programmatic Mechanics, noting that because Chrome has the biggest market share of all browsers, ad-tech firms have to play ball. While the industry is divided on whether Privacy Sandbox is sufficient to power today’s version of digital advertising, little love is lost for the dying cookie. “Cookies are terrible,” said Deva Bronson, executive vp and global head of brand assurance at Dentsu Media. “I’m excited for them to be gone.”

Programmatic

Why Testing Google's Cookie-Alternative Privacy Sandbox Is Still Minimal

Among the criticisms are fewer video solutions and limited reporting

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff